The meaning of honour

On Saturday I was interviewed by a sociologist who is writing a paper on the British honour system and what honour means to people and whether the right people are honoured in the Queen's birthday lists and the like.

I have never subjected myself to this type of experience before, but the author (let's call her M) is the sister of a neighbour, and I was asked, and I thought it would be an interesting experience.

My only fear was that I would be expected to talk on the subject at length, but I don't really know much about it, so I was happy to hear the interview would be Q&A-based.

"Q&A-based"... That's a looser term than I might have anticipated. The first Q was, "So, tell me about yourself."

Thing is, I can talk about myself until the cows come home. I'm "wind me up and watch me go" on the subject of me. It is the one subject that I reckon I know more about than anyone else on the planet. So off I went.

Every once in a while, M would interrupt to have me elaborate on a point, or to go back to something I'd said earlier to contrast against something I'd said later, or to ask a new question and take me in a different direction.

In all, we Q&A'd for about an hour and a quarter or so, and I was actually quite surprised at some of the things that came out of it. Not total surprise, I suppose, because I know myself pretty well; more surprising was the way that a total stranger will take that information and interpret it into something.

That interpretation may be wrong, of course. But when M was saying stuff back to me and (not in a bad way) pigeonholing me, she was right every time.

All of this background stuff is essential for setting my views of the honour system into some sort of context in order to see how people from different socioeconomic groups perceive the system. The whole thing got a little more complicated when I had to talk about things other than me, like honour and OBEs, MBEs, etc.

But it was a fascinating experiment for me, and I'm looking forward to reading the transcript and then doing the follow-up interview in a few weeks' time.