Middle Class Holes 20 - Laurie Penny

Just dreadful

A mountain of self-examination can produce a peanut of self-knowledge.

Take the case of Laura Barnett, aka the writer, journalist and TV script churner Laurie Penny, for it is they. It’s hard to think of another person whose estimation of themself, even after thousands of hours of self-obsession, is as wildly out of true.

She is genderqueer, pansexual, polyamorous, now ‘autistic’ - and pathetic. She goes by they/them, but let that not detain us.

Penny is a product of Brighton College, current fees thirty grand per academic year. All that cash thrown down the swanny, and for what? The Brighton Barnetts could’ve got much the same result packing her off to St Bog’s Comp round the corner. In fact, she might very well have been less indulged and rewarded there, which would’ve been not only much less expensive for Ma and Pa, but much less tiresome for all of us in the long run.

Sometimes, when I’m compiling an entry in Middle Class Holes, I have to search for encapsulatingly representative examples of said Class Hole’s particular idiocy. It can be frustrating, following the trails of their dander in the quest for the perfect paragraph.

No such hindrances where Penny is concerned! Her entire oeuvre is densely packed with on-brand offal. Her writing is a kind of singularity, matter heavily compacted without any chinks through which the light of basic reason might enter. One slab of it is very much like any other slab; excited, posturing nonsense, transmitted from a delusional sub-pocket, a posh person’s hyperbolic rubbish. Her output is nothing much more than the showing of her potty to the world-as-mummy, long after we have seen all that her internal workings can produce. She is about as outrageous as a packet of crisps.

Let’s take a little visit to the Pennyverse.