Aeons ago I saw Keith Joseph (then high prophet of the English right) speaking to a student audience. The host institution's resident left had come prepared to heckle and make mischief - good for them, I have always envied the left their passion and organisation. But he disarmed them when he asked his audience to name the most important thinker of the previous two hundred years: a few young fogeys ventured improbable right wing totems, but Joseph posited Karl Marx and rather gratuitously pointed out that it had been Victorian England that had provided a home for this great thinker.
So, I suspect rather to the surprise of those who think they know me, my first cultural influencer is Karl Marx. His theories were the dominant seed of political and economic thought in the century into which I was born, the starting point for discussion even in economies following a starkly non-Marxist agenda.
I am particularly taken, as I survey the moral wreckage of the business in which I work, with the doctrine of surplus value. The labourer produces daily more than enough for his own subsistence but the capitalist pays him only a subsistence wage and the residue is the surplus value which the capitalist/rentier can purloin for himself.
It took Marx to give his postulated nemesis a name - capitalism. No matter what else you might think, you have to concede that it is pretty cool to have naming rights over your sworn enemy.
This will not be an organised ramble through the back alleys of my mind, so tomorrow we will take a different path and consider civil engineering.
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