Why I Will Never Buy a Gilet

It would be arrogant and self-indulgent if I assumed you know every detail of my life, so I’ll briefly pause today’s rant to update you on my current situation.

I’m now into my second year at University, which means I have escaped the hellish hold of halls and I’m living the dream in a quaint little house in Clifton.

On top of this, working four days a week has given me the disposable income I’ve always craved, which I regularly throw away on Caramel Macchiatos and over-priced pairs of shoes.

For those of you not completely familiar with the geography of Bristol, Clifton is the middle-class capital of the world. No, really.

Never in my life have I come across a place so intolerably ‘cute’. You can actually smell the roasted red pepper hummus, ethically sourced coffee and leather-bound charity shop copies of Hemingway as you walk down the street. It’s almost overpowering.

Now, as I hinted at in a previous post, I’m actually very partial to indulging in the very particular strand of middle-class alternative culture that is springing up across the western-world.

I’d much rather throw on a silk scarf and discuss the merits of Oscar Wilde and John Keats over cocktails than return from Lizard Lounge every Friday night with vomit on one hand and vaginal fluid on the other.

Gross. Moving on.

The problem is, my characteristically hypocritical perspective has resulted in me resenting great swathes of the population who inhabit these middle-class utopias, of which Clifton is just one example.

At first I thought this stemmed solely from my irrational hatred of gilets, which seem to be the uniform of choice for the hordes of floppy-haired Oxford rejects who flock from one Boston Tea Party to the other; funded, of course, by Mummy and Daddy back home.

On closer inspection though, I found that, for once, it wasn’t simply their attire that drew my disdain towards this particular student niche. It was the fact that I’m terrified of joining them.

Yes, you heard me right. I’m genuinely petrified that my love of the quaint and the alternative will cross over into a penchant for the pretentious and the poncy. Take that ridiculously try-hard alliteration for example. God, it’s happening already!

How do I intend to stop myself from succumbing to the Clifton cliché? The only avenue left for me is to continue on the path of contradictory criticism, bitterly resenting all that I’m actually guilty of and never, I repeat NEVER, buying a gilet.