Katy Guest: Rant & Rave (19/06/11)

Rant

A small correction to last week's stories about Ascot: it's not tattoos that make people boorishly drunk and suddenly violent. When I worked as staff at a summer's worth of Cambridge May Balls, I saw the carnage that stems almost inevitably from a sense of entitlement steeped for 12 hours in gallons of booze.

The smashed champagne glasses ground into manicured lawns by stiletto heels; the food fights; the ordering about; the vomit-crusted taffeta. However many perfectly lovely posh people I meet, I can't quite forget the unique unpleasantness of drunken privilege. It's why I now believe that anyone who has ever been in the Bullingdon Club should be banned for life from holding public office.

Rave

Two spurious studies from the University of the Blindingly Obvious have added academic support to that thing that we all knew already about men who drive flash cars and use the words "I love you" as if they were punctuation. The first study, which has been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, compares a male Porsche-driver to a peacock, who uses conspicuous displays to find a mate and then drops her as soon as he's ruffled her feathers.

The second, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that men tend to say "I love you" before women, after an average 97.3 days, and that you shouldn't trust one who says it much sooner (he's trying to rush you into something, and it ain't buying you a Porsche). Perhaps next they will study men in white vans who beep at women pedestrians on the South Circular, and then never have anything to say once they've got our attention. I think they might find that a lack of physical attributes to show off about is what makes them so attention-seeking yet simultaneously shy. To summarise, then: we're looking for a nice man in a sensible Renault Laguna, who'll drive you to the station in it on rainy days instead of having to say that he loves you for, ooh, at least a year. Could the university please get a top team tracking down the whereabouts of all these perfect men?