Citizens! Quite a few of my middle class friends have been getting in touch with me putting forward superb suggestions for categories to include in the future, as well as important details that I’ve already missed. Their ideas have been so good that I thought I’d try to cast the net wider and ask all readers of this blog to contribute. So:
This is your chance to spill-all. Tell me: What am I missing? What should I include in the future? What other important things do the aspiring bourgeois need to know?
All suggestions, ideas, jokes, criticisms, waffle, nonsense and moments of brilliance will be most gratefully received. Just post them in the comments below.
Definitely Israel, but obviously a minefield! Oh God, perhaps too many pitfalls…
Yikes! Although, maybe I could write about how we in the middle class are too afraid to go there… in a physical, mental and everything else sense…
Making jam, foraging, glamping, keeping chickens.
God, I feel like a class traitor. Most of the entries are very biased towards people aged 30ish, what about old middle classes or teenagers? Gap years? Losing your virginity on a beach in Cornwall? Suddenly finding you like the gardening section in The Telegraph so that justifies buying it, working out convoluted ways of avoiding inheritance tax…
Brilliant! Thank you!
Just thought of another one – Farrow and Ball paint.
School fees – or rather more precisely – those who complain about them. I had a ride in a Cambridge taxi once, (who hasn’t?) and whilst chatting to the driver learned that he had just come on his shift from a day job. He would drive through the night and have a few hours kip before starting again at his other job in the morning. When pressed as to the reason a man might labour so, seemingly only for something as trivial as money, he explained that he was a single parent whose son had excelled so much at his school, they had advised that he be taken out and educated somewhere that could really nurture his prodigious talent. Even with a scholarship at the place he ended up, this chap needed to work all hours to raise the cash to finance it. And he wouldn’t have it any other way he assured me. Now, had I referred to him as being middle-class I think he would have smashed all of my privately-white teeth out with his big workman’s hands. At the other end of the scale, there are those who send their children to private school for whom £50,000 – £100,000 a year means nothing. It simply never gets thought about, let alone spoken of. And in between – those who send their children to private school because, ‘well, we must’, and yet complain, bitterly and without end, about how hard it is to pay the fees. This is because it serves as a vent for the anxiety born from that other great middle-class standard – never, ever talk about money. Money is persona non-grata, a necessary evil, something which is just, you know, made and spent, keeps us alive, not important at all, really. Except when the school fees are concerned. Then it can be treated like the immigrant family in the village, the alcoholic in the bridge-four or the queer waiter at an otherwise perfectly respectable restaurant; everybody has to endure it so it becomes common ground for complaint. And what is more, the complaint is shared with the children – a family joke! The dear little things – with daddy’s chinless faces and mummy’s propensity to wear her collar up and bray such things as ‘naughty but nice’ as she face-ladles another trough of chocolate pudding – are all too aware of their burdensome position in the family unit. And quite right too – children should know their place – its ‘character building.’
Specifically, choosing the neutrals on the Farrow and Ball paint chart. What white? There are so many to choose from.
http://www.farrow-ball.com/productlist.aspx?cid=PC&language=en-GB
These are great. Thank you! The idea of a middle class colour spectrum is really making me laugh. There is no such thing as ‘plain white’. There are hundreds of shades from ‘Dimity’ to ‘Savage Ground.’
I didn’t even know what Farrow & Ball paint and glamping were until I read this
Who is this Foxley Wood chap? I like the cut of his jib.
It was only a matter of time before you found out…
Foxley Wood is a place near Norwich… Nice bluebells there. It’s a very good rant, isn’t it?
Nursery choices are a good one. Montessori? Steiner? Little organic vegetable patches for the French-speaking toddlers to frolic in?
I have yet to meet a middle class person who does not say “But the colours have so much more depth in Farrow and Ball”… (On the whites, don’t forget your own culpability, Jordison – we’ve chosen “Dimity” and “White tie”).
line caught fish fingers
Nice! thanks!
no worries, all the rage here in n16…
Not sure how this website/blog thingy really works, probably I’m not middle class enough. I live in the increasingly middle class Chorlton cum Hardy (yes it’s a real place) and was delighted to recently note a number of reproducable middle classisms at the local Farmer’s Market. One must attend such an event with the family schnauzer dog (non aggressive, non allergenic breed) and a child named Lucas. Lucas must select his own organic falafel and give the money to the nice farmer man all by himself. I am sounding mean now, and I love Chortlon, but there are plenty of opportunites for tee-heeing over some of the more obvious middle class themes. Guardian is always sold out at the paper shop too