Pop

So, Pop has been chosen for next year and I didn't get in. On the one had I'm not bothered; I never expected to get chosen and didn't really want to anyway, but at the same time it's a bit of a wake up call, insofar as my Eton career will now never be thought of as distinguished.

Pop (a nickname for the ‘Eton Society’) is the group of B blockers who act as school prefects. There are only about sixteen of them, so it’s an exclusive group of which to be a member. Poppers’ main duties include monitoring boys in chapel, signing in boys to certain events and acting as general doormen and lackeys. It sounds like a chore, but the power rush to be gained from bossing people around more than makes up for the extra workload.

One of the other advantages of being in Pop is the outfit. Poppers wear a different uniform to everyone else, which is both distinguishable and cool. Besides the normal tailcoat they are allowed to wear grey spotted trousers and a waistcoat of their choice. The design of this waistcoat is entirely up to the wearer, which means that football team crests, national flags, fluorescent colours and even sequins are not uncommon. If there is a list of banned designs by the school it probably only covers pornographic material and anything Nazi-related.

It must be great to wear this uniform, and after a few weeks of prancing around in it and shouting at E blockers you can imagine most poppers getting a bit big-headed. And indeed, most of them do become quite arrogant. But rather than being a deterrent that's part of the appeal – it’s an enormous ego boost and you’ve only got a million years in which come back down to Earth.

As with anything that’s highly sought after though, becoming a popper is not easy. There’s no application process as such, but you have to stand out in such a way as to be eligible for a leadership role. In most cases this is by being good at sport, but in can be in other areas too, music and drama for instance.

The electoral system is a tad controversial. Every summer a committee meets to decide which C blockers will make up the Pop for the following academic year. This committee consists of both beaks and current poppers, and they rely on recommendations from others and their own judgment to pick the lucky few.

Fine. Nothing too dodgy. But the problem is: who chooses these people on the committee? And who monitors how much influence they exert over the decision-making?

The truth is that every year one or two boys appear on the Pop list whose inclusion is very questionable. Boys who you might not have even placed on a B list of candidates. And boys who, if you do a bit of digging around, you find have strong links to one of the members of the committee.

In my first year this problem blew up when one tutor group had five out of its six boys elected into Pop. Five out of six! You don’t need a statistician to tell you the chances of this occurring naturally are several million to one. And who was the tutor in question? Answer: a member of the Pop committee.

Despite this fault in the system, I'm told the process is better than it used to be. Back in the day the new intake were elected entirely by the current poppers, with no chance of a veto by the school authorities, the result of which was a massive culture of cronyism and the election of some far from suitable individuals.

Although things may have improved since, there is still a hint of nepotism. Making friends with the right people, particularly current poppers, is essential for any ambitious C blocker. Strategies can include anything from making general conversation to going drinking together and even inviting them to parties and on holiday. Essentially, nothing you wouldn't have found in the bribing and lobbying at FIFA!

This year there wasn’t actually too much surprise in the Pop election. Most of the shocks in fact are in finding out which people weren't picked; this year, several big names in the football and rugby teams. People whose inclusion you would never have questioned had they been chosen.

However, when complete bellends who might very well have got in don’t end up on the teamsheet it’s one of the best feelings! It happened to one boy this year and I couldn’t help giving him a ‘sorry you didn’t get in’ the next time I saw him, delivered with a smirk of course. Perhaps even more entertaining though is when boys who don’t have the slimmest chance in hell of getting chosen see themselves as genuine contenders.

These people are not that easy to spot, however. This is because that no-one actually walks around talking up their chances of getting into Pop. To do so would be so unbelievably uncouth that everyone would hate them forever. The only way to find out, therefore, if someone considers themselves Pop-material is to study their behaviour in the run-up to the event. This can be done at the lunch table, when the election is the main topic of conversation. If someone speaks like they’re an authority on the subject, and in particular dismisses the names of other people being put forward, you can tell he’s a wannabe. Any unusually strong interest in the event is basically a good sign, and if you’re not sure of a person's ambitions beforehand you can always tell after the event when he's bound to look rather glum.

Indeed, there was one person in my house who fulfilled this stereotype this year: Dark Horse. Not content with campaigning for just the house captaincy (on the back of his parents’ hobnobbing with our house master I should remind you), his ambitions had stretched to the target of Pop. Every time we discussed it at lunch or supper he dominated the conversation, giving us all the ‘insider goss’ about who was and wasn’t likely to be picked. How he got all this information I don’t know, but only someone with a personal interest in the result would have gone to such lengths to obtain it. On the day of the results he was strutting around even more than usual and I genuinely feared the little dweeb might have fixed it. But no! Thank God no! My faith in humanity was restored when his name was absent from the list. Not this time mate!

Of course, I don’t have much to brag about myself because I'm not going to be in Pop anytime soon. All of which has left me thinking: how will I be remembered by the future generations? Will I be remembered at all? Politicians are forever worrying about their legacies, so maybe I should too. But if I can’t establish a legacy via the conventional route (Pop) then perhaps I should go unconventional. But how unconventional? Suggestions welcome.