I live 4600 miles from the city in which I grew up. It’s a different country. It’s a different continent. It’s supposedly a different culture.

Yet everywhere I go, I see the same types of people.

Whilst I’m back in Bath for a few weeks, I’ve been reminded of one particular type. They exist in both the UK and the US, but my primary experience of them has been in Britain.

I call them “Cravat Man”.

They’re middle-aged, middle-class white folk, who seem to care more about what people think of them, than about their own happiness.

I’m not thinking of anyone in particular, they’re everywhere. There’s probably an American equivalent, but I haven’t experienced it yet.

I call them “Cravat Man” because they are the only people I know who would actually wear a cravat without being involved in a period drama. These days, most of them don’t even actually wear a cravat, but you just know it’s there in spirit.

They don’t party; they have people round for drinks. They don’t go out drinking, they have a drink at the bar whilst waiting for a table at a restaurant where the music is strictly (ch)easy-listening.

They talk about their, “standing in the community”. I’m sorry but unless you’re a member of the Royal family, funded by taxpayers’ money, how you conduct your private life is your own business, and unless you’re actually running for some sort of civic office, no-one really gives a shit about your “standing in the community”. Get over yourselves, you pompous arses.

Having people round for drinks, and for that matter anything which involves dealing with multiple acquaintances, involves hours of agonising over who to invite, who not to invite, who’ll be offended if they’re not invited, who didn’t respond last time they were invited, and who, if not invited, will bump into people who were invited and be pissed off that they weren’t. Still with me?

It’s the same deal with Christmas cards. I’ve noticed that people in the US don’t go in for sending Christmas cards with anything like the fervour of the British. Frankly, it’s another reason to love living in the US, as far as I’m concerned.

Cravat Man and his wife will spend days just planning who they’re sending cards to this year. It involves drawing up a list of all the people they sent cards to last year, and cross-referencing it with a list of people who sent them cards last year, adding anyone interesting they met on holiday in the past 12 months, and subtracting anyone who’s died, and anyone who’s the bad-guy half of a divorce of friends.

I think there are further sort-routines involved, but I don’t have the will power to think about them. Suffice it to say that if Mr or Mrs Cravat-Man were more technologically savvy, they’d have a set of relational databases, and a stored query to calculate who they actually need to send a Christmas card to.

One thing that I’ve been on the receiving end of, is their “What will the neighbours think?” approach to life. Sadly, for the cravat-centric community, my approach to life is more one of, “the neighbours should mind their own damn business, and stop living vicariously through me.”

Whilst I’d never do anything to deliberately upset those around me, life is too damn short to spend time worrying about what a bunch of people who you didn’t choose as friends think.

Of course, the latest fashion in Britain, as far as cravat-enabled neighbourhoods go, is the covenant-controlled neighbourhood. It’s an idea that will be familiar to those of you in the US, where it’s been around for a long time.

However, word has reached me that in certain parts of the UK, as with the US, these neighbourhoods have started to become known as ‘communities’, and or more worryingly, ‘gated communities’.

The term ‘gated community’ sounds to me, rather like a cross between a retirement home, and a military prison. The difference being of course, that both those institutions are far more welcoming of newcomers and visitors than these so-called communities.

Such neighbourhoods are set to flourish however, as Cravat Man and his like find them ideal. How much better does it get when you live somewhere that your parties can never be gatecrashed by anyone from outside, because there’s no way outsiders would be able to break through the barricades and past the machine-gun nests?

You have to wonder why, if these people are seeking to be thought of as “pillars of the community” in their town, they spend so much time and money, trying to isolate themselves from so many sections of the community.

It’s as if they’re saying, “ I want to stand out in the community, as long as the community is exactly like me.”

The problem is, if everyone were all like Cravat Man, there’d never be enough nibbles when we all came round for drinks.