Why make a site about the Middle Class?
It’s gone time that someone wrote a good guide to the British middle class. They are, after all, a national obsession. Google “middle class”and you’ll get more than 12million hits for UK websites alone. Hardly a day goes by without some news story about middle class fortunes and misfortunes. They’re even the battleground on which the current general election campaign is being fought, with every party desperate to appear the middle-man-on-the-street’s best friend.
And this political fixation isn’t new. “We’re all middle class now,” John Prescott famously claimed in 1997. He was understandably keen to conjure an image of an electorate surrounded by tasteful furniture, heritage themed paintwork and people happy to share a concern about lactose intolerance.
Even so (and not untypically) the former Deputy Prime Minister encountered a fair bit of derision when he made that statement. Our fascination with all things middle class is made all the stronger by a certain amount of discomfort. The curious fact is that even the middle classes in the UK aren’t entirely happy about their status. “Middle class” has become the deadliest insult you can level at someone on the country’s most popular internet talkboard – The Guardian’s Comment Is Free – while “bourgeois” has been a slur since the at least the time of the French revolution. We love to mock the middle class almost as much as we actually love them – and even though most of us are them.
And that’s because the middle classes are daft. Hilariously so. A huge, confused gaggle of guilt, gossip, three-wheel buggies, fungi forays, iphones, French holidays, reverse snobbery, plain snobbery, organic vegetables and home improvement shows.
In spite of all that interest and fertile ground for comedy, no good guide to the middle class seems to have been produced since A Diary Of A Nobody. Organic Peas and Orderly Queues will plug this gap and provide the ultimate guide to getting down with the Joneses, chatting up the silent majority and making your way in Middle Britain. Naturally, it will take the mickey, but it will also be affectionate. With their confusion, uncertainties, desperation not to appear foolish, and their determination to get ahead, the middle classes are fallible and loveable just like everyone else. Even if they have a slightly bigger obsession with kitchenware.
I’m going to be gradually building an A-Z of middle class foibles and obsessions. I will also welcome comment and input.
Finally, it’s worth noting the other charming thing about the middle classes: they’re able to laugh about themselves. They positively enjoy it. Which is a very good thing since they constitute just about everybody that goes into a bookshop, they always make sure they have the fullest supermarket trolleys and will be buying ipads in droves. Organic Peas and Orderly Queues is as much for them as about them.
P.S. It’s also for people that aren’t middle class. Everyone else enjoys laughing at them too – just as much the middles classes don’t dare laugh at anyone else for fear of giving offence.
P.P.S. I’m middle class too. Of course.
My husband and I had the ultimate middle class dilemma in Waitrose – fairdtrade sugar or organic sugar? “Why can”t they do organic *and* fairtrade?” I huffed as we plumped for the fairtrade.
Funny! (Although, doesn’t it have to be fairtrade to qualify as organic? At least according to soil association standards?)
Fair trade relates to how how the people who produce the food are treated while organic relates to the benefits to the environment and consumer by not using synthetic chemicals.