Respect

This is a post-script to the previous post, Upwardly Mobile Tadpoles.

One of things things I do in order to try to keep senility at bay is try to memorise things. For many years this took the form of brushing up my schoolboy French, but that has now been put on the back burner (mettre en veilleuse)at a disappointingly modest level. Now my efforts centre round taking small parts with not many lines in plays.

In between plays I've been brushing up on selected verses of Gray's "Elegy", one of the poems I "did" for "O" level. This stanza, slightly amended, is, I think, highly relevant to the equality debate:

Let not th'Ambitious mock our useful toil,
Our homely joys and destiny obscure;
Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.

In a word, in a truly egalitarian society, "all sorts and conditions of men" (and women)deserve, and will receive, respect.