Pippa Middleton + other well knowns

Sadly there are those who do follow the 'celeb culture' and are actually influenced by this. Personally I couldn't care less, don't know who half of them are and wouldn't notice if they vanished off the face of the earth.

I quite agree Aka, I have never heard of Felicity Cloake. As for Pippa, she is playing to the audience because her sister has married Royalty. We had never heard of her before the marriage.

I'm another that agrees with Aka: I'm not influenced by them and haven't heard of most of them. It does make you wonder about those who do rush out and do whatever some celebrity is doing.

'It's not what you it's who you know.'

Which is what I was told very smugly by another candidate when I went for a job interview. And she was right.

rosequartz - I have heard it said that that is one of the real values of university education and public school: the contacts you have once you leave.

It is why I have more admiration for the likes of Richard Branson, Alan Sugar, Deborah Meaden. There's a whole slew of them that achieved 'greatness' without a single academic qualification to their names. I suppose they succeeded in spite of not having those connnections so well done to them

Pippa is most definitely hanging on her sisters coat tails !

Still opportunism goes with territory !

Holly, she didn't have the qualifications that the other candidate and I had, but she was friendly with the chairman of the governors!

We mostly like to think ourselves unlikely to subscribe to the Sleb culture so why do those wretched mags like OK and Hello do so well? My hairdresser has at last sussed that I like magazines with WORDS in them so my "pile" while I am waiting for my colour to take includes Good Housekeeping or Country Living. Not exactly New Statesman but an improvement on pregnant footballers' wives! However there was a longish thread on the surgically enhanced former glamour model recently so some are apparently interested

Sorry- footballers' pregnant wives! The former would be newsworthy!!

Soutra, I took a pile of Country Living mags to my hairdresser as I thought along the same lines as you - not everyone wants to read OK or Hello. She looked at them as though they were in a foreign language

I usually take something with me to read if I'm going to be longer than 20 mins.