Just a quick point of information: I posted a link to this site on the chippingnorton.net forum and have had a fantastic response. (Kudos to Chipping Norton for having such an active forum.) In the subsequent comment thread, a poster called Gerry wrote the following:

“You need to know that nobody from Chippy does their shopping at the Daylesford Farm Shop.”

Big Billy Boswer added: “We can’t afford it with the cuts“

So there we are.

Elsewhere, others have claimed that my joke about the Movable Feast chippy has no validity since “moveable” can also be written without an ‘e’. Sadly, they are right and I am wrong. Damn.

UPDATE

And here’s another fantastic Daylesford post from “Newshound”:

It never ceases to amaze me how many column inches in newspapers, magazines and just about anywhere else are given to Daylesford Organics or whatever it’s called. For some reason editors and hacks seem to think it’s the new centre of the universe or at least the Cotswolds and it’s the Cotswolds version of ‘arrods’ if they set their satnavs to Chipping Norton it takes them to Daylesford or Daylesford they get Chippy and think the locals are in awe of celebrities and the rich and famous in their midst.

So Sam this is the secret of Daylesford – Daylesford is a meeting place for the rich and famous, people who want to be famous and people who want to think their famous and want you to think they’re famous by having a cup of coffee alongside the “crowd”. The Hurley’s and the Winset’s who moved into the countryside thinking they are going to be an important member of the community and to show off to anyone their new lover/husband/someone else’s husband and no one’s going to bother them have come to realise that no one gives a rats-arse who they are, so they have to be seen somewhere, add to that the rich who are not famous but like to be seen in the company who are.

As Gerry mentioned nobody actually shops there, why on earth anyone would pay £16 for a breast fed chicken I don’t know, mind you people have been known to spend £50 on a few bits just to say they have rubbed shoulders with Samantha Cameron, which brings me back to Chippy while the “I shop where its posh” set go to Daylesford to rub shoulders with the likes Samantha and et al , in reality Dave joins the queue like everyone else in Chippy and shops in Sainsbury’s where nobody bothers him recognises him or gives a toss, that is the reason for him living here, personally if I want to catch a glimpse of Dave I wouldn’t spend 70 grand on a Range Rover to be “seen” at Daylesford I would wait until Dave’s in Sainsbury’s, plus I can buy a chicken for a fiver.

One other thing Sam, Chippy have had the famous and not so rich in our midst for years, Keith Moon the loon from the Who once owned the Crown & Cushion Hotel who after his hangers-on had gone was actually normal, on one occasion upon his arrival in town in his pink Rolls Royce parked in the car park full of birds with the music cranked up loud was told by a friend I was with ‘you can turn that f****** row down’ which he did, plus there are many others around from stage and screen who I can’t be bothered to mention.

Welcome to Chipping Norton Sam.

This splendid post was written by Helen Pockett in response to my last piece about Chipping Norton:

The thought of talking to strangers seems to fill British people with horror. A horror that isn’t entirely unreasonable given the quality of conversation that you tend to get from those few eccentrics that do tend to embark on social intercourse with the people they meet on the street… Everything I know about what it’s like to have been one of Millwall football club’s infamous casuals in the 1980s (when they spent most of their time hurling inanimate objects – like Tottenham fans-  at members of the constabulary) and everything I know about what bastards the Prots are, I have learned from people I had never met before.

Even should the stranger turn out to be pleasant and entertaining, he or she probably woudn’t be the right kind of person to speak to as far as my mission to take the pulse of British town’s goes. The kind of person likely to speak to you out of the blue isn’t a representative kind of person at all. Especially somewhere like Chipping Norton. From what I could make out  in Chippy, people who know each other barely even converse, so outsiders like me don’t stand a hope.

All of which is a long way into explaining why this post is mainly going to consist of observations on shops and architecture.

The first thing you notice driving through Chipping Norton is that it’s really quite pretty:

There’s a lot of honeyed stone, some admirably solid looking Georgian buildings, a red telephone box (always a sign that time hasn’t destroyed too much in a place) and a marked absence of concrete monstrosities.

The next thing you notice is that it’s really quite small, and that you’ve driven through without seeing anything of interest at all. So I doubled back, parked up and decided to stroll around on foot. Elly, meanwhile, decided to stay in the car.

“Don’t you want to look around?” I asked.

“Why would I want to look around Chipping Norton?”

It was a question I couldn’t honestly answer.  I went out onto the streets alone, while she did whatever it was that seemed more appealing, like staring at the rain sliding down the front window of the dadmobile. It didn’t take long for me to realise she had made the right choice.

There was nothing actually wrong with the place, there was nothing much to remark on at all, in fact. It is one of those quiet, private English towns where whatever action there is goes on behind closed doors, in private houses. There was no street life. I didn’t even see any pigeons.

And so, the list of shops:

There’s a Boots and a Sainsbury’s and the usual high street banks, but Chipping Norton seems to have largely escaped the bland brand makeover that has wrecked so many British towns. Things here were a bit more individual. There are a lot of antique shops and antiquarian book shops. There’s a flowery looking restaurant called “Wild Thyme”. . There are a great many local estate agents (A two bed terrace costs £200,000.) There’s a pleasingly old fashioned hardware shops. There’s a wedding dress shop. There’s a deli and cheese shop. There was also a good looking butcher’s shop, and a chip shop. Can you guess what they call the chip shop in Chipping Norton?

Nope. Good try though. It was actually:

I’m undecided about this one. Points for the literary reference. Commiserations for failing to spell “moveable”* correctly on a gigantic sign that is likely to be there for years to come…

The local bookshop gave off similarly mixed signals. On the one hand, it was a small independent with a respectable fiction section. On the other, the first book I saw when I walked in was a biography of the former Conservative Prime Minister Anthony Eden. The next was a rightwing book about empire by Niall Ferguson. There’s also a book called “What Darwin Got Wrong”, a surprisingly large Mind, Body And Spirit section and an unsurprisingly large section dedicated to Royal Wedding Books… Not exactly a liberal paradise, but a bustling little shop, nonetheless.

Elsewhere Chipping Norton remained silent and grey. It was Sunday, after all. The closest thing to excitement was the horrible renting noise when someone drove past me with – I presume – the handbreak still engaged. The back wheels of the car weren’t moving at all and they made a really astonishing racket. Not that the driver seemed to care. He was smiling rather blissfully. He was, I was surprised to realise, completely off his gourd – in no state to be driving at all, even with the breaks on.  He was quite an anomaly on those quiet streets. Had he been partying all night? I couldn’t imagine that nightlife in Chipping Norton was particularly kicking. It looked like no one had had a good time there since at least the 19th century. But then again, there was this place:

Here’s a close up of the sign over the door:

Rocking! Clearly, with all that PUBLIC MUSIC and DANCING there is a lot of fun to be had in Chippy.

At this point – and especially given my opening complaint about how hard it is to meet people in British cities -  you might be thinking that the diligent thing for me to do would be to stick around and sample the local nightlife. In a sense, I suppose, you might be right. But there’s only so much suffering you can do for art. Besides I’d actually already gone one better. A number of years ago, I went to a house party near Chipping Norton and met quite a few locals. These were all rich young men and they all used to spend most of their summers locating disused quarries, dragging sound systems to them and getting their friends to dance in them all night long – not unlike the Conservative political blogger Guido Fawkes and his unnamed friend a few years before them.

Like many posh young men, the Chipping Norton crowd were very very keen on reggae. One of them was that night  in a state of considerable excitement because he’d just posted his latest homemade roots compilation to the queen, to mark her birthday. He explained to me that in previous years he’d always sent a C90 tape of his current reggae listening to the Queen Mother on her birthday, since he felt sure that she’d love a bit of herb music, but since her sad passing he had focussed attention on the queen instead. He reasoned that even if the queen didn’t appreciate the reggae, Prince Phillip or Prince Harry almost certainly would . “So it won’t be wasted.”

I couldn’t argue with that logic, and anyway, he quickly lost interest in talking to me, preferring to stick to his own friends. Later on though, he did capture the attention of the room by warning the man next to him never to turn into a lady. “I mean, if you did, it would be awful,” he said. “You couldn’t come to the golf club since you’ve got to wear trousers on the green and you certainly couldn’t come to school re-unions.”

“Yah,” said his friend.

It was like listening to a modern day Bertie Wooster – although with a lot more weed and a lot less brains. The thing that especially struck me was how happy their world was. It was a place where the Queen Mother wasn’t a sour old Nazi, where every club is open to you, where the summer is one long party… Like  Daylesford, it seemed to me to be a rather happy world to live in. Just one that was far removed from the reality of most people’s lives. One that also seemes very distant from any middle class life that I can recognise. David Cameron may claim to be from the “sharp-elbowed middle”, but on the evidence of Chipping Norton, he actually exists pretty near the plummy nosed top.

*PEDANTRY UPDATE – I have since realised that you can spell “Moveable” without and ‘e’ too. Damn!

*STOP PRESS*

Someone on twitter has just alerted me to this wonderful picture of the Chipping Norton pub cricket team. I rest my case.

These must be organic dark chocolate containing at least 97% cocoa solids. They are for you. Easter eggs are not to be fed to children under any circumstances. Children’s eggs are filled with evil sugar, produced by evil brands, and ever so slightly vulgar. As is well known, allowing the kiddies too much fun and chocolate is bad for the moral fibre of your household – not least because it causes you to have to lie when you are discussing your children’s diet with your neighbours. Besides, the little cherubs will prefer the wooden eggs you have painted for them and thoroughly enjoy reflecting on the ills of materialism and the kinds of shiny baubles that so distract other children.  Sure they will…

(Chipping Norton Part 2 will be along soon…)

Picture from: http://dogs.thefuntimesguide.com/2006/03/dog_easter_eggs_rabbits.php

The first place I went was Daylesford Organic. This is a large and successful farm shop selling just the kind of ecological, fair-trade-food-porn produce that appeals to such large swathes of the middle classes. It’s a place where you can even get your dishwasher salts in brown paper bags, to make them look that bit more rustic and earth-friendly. Its windows and doors are painted in the standard heritage green (or “coalshed door green”  as Alan Bennett rightly describes this incomprehensibly fashionable colour). They have those chalk boards talking about how “seasonal” everything is, how “organic” it is, and how all baked goods are made by “artisans”. But this is not your average middle class deli. Far from it.

In fact, far from everywhere.  Although it aims to be local in all things, Daylesford isn’t really local to anyone. The Cotswold shop is miles from the nearest settlement. So the only way to get hold of their environmentally friendly food is to travel there in your polluting car. Judging by the car park, you have to go there in a very big car too. Preferably a Range Rover. It was these gleaming rows of over-priced metal that first told me how unusual this place was. There was only one car in there that was worth less than £40,000. Mine.

And then, there were the people. The older ones, I could understand. In every farm shop in the UK, you’re likely to see a selection of stern looking women draped in heavy jewellery, dragging behind them their defeated looking husbands. It was the younger element who appeared so alien. The first person I saw who seemed about my age also seemed about 70. He stepped out of a BMW, dressed in a green polo neck, corduroy trousers, brogues and one of those quilted shooting jackets that the seriously inbred tend to wear. His hair was flicked to one side of a ruler straight parting. His cheeks were ruddy with port. It was only when his wife handed him his baby to hold that I realised he can’t have been older than 35. This wife, of course, was blonde and wearing riding boots. So were all the other women. The rest of the men generally sported blazers and had their shirts tucked into their chinos and all wore heavy expensive-looking watches. I’d rarely seen people like them outside of the Telegraph lifestyle section. I had thought I lived in a middle-class bubble. The people in Daylesford lived in a sealed off pressure-cabin. They just weren’t like the rest of us. This was a strange new land, with different fashions, different genes (that made everyone slightly taller and much uglier) and different ideas about prices.

A friend of mine had warned me about this latter phenomenon, claiming that when he’d visited he’s seen a piece of driftwood on sale for £350. Even so, I was astonished.   I spent most of the time that I was in the shop turning over price tags in amazement and fear:

Tea towel: £30
Candle: £10
Biscuits: £5
Olive oil, 750ml: £16
Wellies: £60
Bottle of champagne: £100
Two garden urns: £10,500

That’s right. £10,500. I noticed, because a woman had turned the label over and screamed.

“I don’t understand how they’ve put that many noughts on it,” she said. “It doesn’t compute in my world.”

“At least you get two of them,” I said.

“They must have got it wrong.”

We looked again. No. £10,500 for two stone urns. They were admittedly quite big. But that was all.

“This place really isn’t for me,” the woman said. I knew exactly what she meant. It was for a very different kind of person. Someone like…

“I’ve just seen Samantha Cameron buying her lunch!”

It was my better half, Elly, back from her own tour around the shop.

“Really?”

“It was definitely her. She had that nose and that long look. She was by the cheese.  She saw me looking at her and she took on that awkward look celebrities have when they know they’ve been busted. I even felt sorry for her, for a minute. That she couldn’t even by her lunch in peace. But then I remembered how much her lunch must have cost, compared to, say a month’s dole money, and so…”

We didn’t need to go into detail about our dislike of the Tories. I would have dashed off to take a picture, but Elly also told me that the prime minister’s wife was there with her children, so it didn’t seem fair. Besides, by that time I’d noticed something quite alarming. Elly had a bag in her hand. She saw me looking.

“I’ve just spent £50,” she said. “But I’ve bought us supper.”

“For a week?”

“No.”

She looked sorry enough as it was, without my moaning, so I bit my lip and I took her to laugh at the urns. And then, my other favourite item, an organic travel set, consisting of an eye mask, what looked like a tiny little lap blanket and a hot water bottle cover. The label said: “Was £295, now £350″. It seemed as if the fact that it now cost even more was supposed to be something in its favour.It was a strange land.

We took one more tour past the fabulous cheese counter, round the carefully tasteful slate-covered shop floor, through the heritage green doors and out into the real world.

Later that week the papers reported that the Camerons went on holiday together to Spain.

“Mindful of how a luxury holiday would appear amid massive public spending cuts, David and Samantha Cameron flew to Spain with budget airline Ryanair to celebrate her 40th birthday,” reported The Daily Mail.  “And despite their wealth, they stayed in a three-star family run hotel.” The whole thing must have cost them less than their lunch. Speaking of which, I have to reluctantly admit that our £50-worth of cheese and ham was delicious. I mean, really good. It must be wonderful to be middle class like the regular Daylesford shoppers. So long as you don’t have a social conscience.

*and the rest of the UK, even if they didn’t vote for him.

**as in: ‘There is a criticism sometimes of Sure Start that a great new centre is established and the sharp-elbowed middle classes – like my wife and me – get in there and get all the services.’

OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE. Our Couch End bookshop is being replaced by an artisan ice creamery

Followed by: Only three new artisan bakeries have opened since January. Only three!

Oh dear.

Meanwhile, like all middle class bloggers, I’m going to have to apologise for the scarcity of updates recently. Linda Grant is actually providing far more info than I am. My excuse is that I’ve been busy working to pay the mortgage. Isn’t that boring?! More happily though, I’ve also been doing a photographic tour of my own hood, which I’ll be putting up here soon. I also had a funny idea for an A-Z entry based on cooking homemade food versions of childhood favourites. Like those fishfingers that we have all tried to make once with expensive fish and breadcrumbs, that cost loads more, take forever, and don’t taste half so good as the 19p a tonne ones from Sainsburys… Anyway… I’ll be back on it soon.

In the meantime, if you want to follow Linda Grant on Twitter for all your sweary funny Crouch End news, she is: @lindasgrant .

“As part of John Lewis’ commitment to support the fight against knife crime, you can no longer buy a kitchen knife online. The idea that a John Lewis customer would ever commit any kind of crime is particularly distressing.”

Just before Christmas a poster called Phil Chamberlain posted a message on this site saying:

“I enjoy this blog a lot. However, it’s really about the upper middle classes – or rather, a particularly liberal section of it – rather than the “middle” middle class itself, which is busy reading the Daily Mail and living in places like Bromley, and not worrying itself in the slightest bit about ethical sourcing, yoga or anything similar.”

It struck a chord, even if I’m as confused as everyone else about the difference between upper, middle and middle class. Where do the boundaries lie? If, for instance, our ruler David Cameron is, as he likes to claim, upper middle class rather than just a toff I’m clearly not writing about the upper middle classes. But I suppose it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility that Dave might be trying to fool us. Meanwhile, I guess the main point Phil Chamberlain made stands however you choose to slice up our absurdly complicated class system. This blog has been pretty narrow in scope so far. As Phil rightly says I’m basically writing about liberal inner city Guardianistas for whom food is more of a competitive sport than a means of sustenance, for whom the suburbs are as alien and frightening as the Gobi desert and who definitely don’t clean the car on a Sunday.

So what of this other middle England? Just as I was wondering what I should write about it, some PR company put out a survey claiming to have found the heart of middle Britain. Yes, this was a transparent attempt to get publicity – and yes, I’ve been suckered right in (twice!), but the results still seemed fairly interesting to me.

These are the top ten towns in Middle Britain that they identified:

1     Slough
2     Rushmoor
3     Bexley
4     Spelthorne
5     Harrow
6     Bracknell Forest
7     Broxbourne
8     Hillingdon
9     Dartford
10     Milton Keynes

That list might as well have come from a book I once co-edited called Crap Towns. These are not places like Crouch End and Lewes. They are distinguished by roundabouts and appalling architecture rather than their over-priced delis, and three-wheeler buggies. Indeed, plenty of them did feature in Crap Towns. Slough, the number one town, featured especially heavily for obvious Betjeman-related reasons – and because of a hilarious campaign by residents of nearby Windsor to get their own postcode so that they didn’t have their addresses tarnished by the “SL” brand.

Crap Towns was written in what now seem like the halcyon days of New Labour. Back when it seemed terribly unfair that some places should be so much worse than others since there was so much money sloshing around the UK. I doubt that it would be half as funny to try to do a book like that nowadays. There would certainly be less point as there’s no hope that anywhere is going to get better anytime soon. That said, I did get a familiar twinge of excitement when I re-googled Slough and pretty much the first thing that came up was this hilarious website. Any town that needs to set up a website called Proud to be Slough clearly has image problems. Particularly if the pull quote on that site reads: “Slough has an energy which rivals the heart of London.” John Ryan , Sales Manager, Formula 1 Karting.

Google also taught me that:

1) Slough has the highest proportion of religious adherents in England. This strikes me as further bad news. It’s not so much the boring pious neighbour aspect of that figure that troubles me, but the desperation it suggests. Life in the real world, when the real world is Slough seems to have driven a lot of people into yearning for less distressing imaginary alternatives.

2) According to research by the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) in 2006, Slough is England’s least tranquil area.

3) Astonishingly, the local council are trying to make Slough even more ugly. Here’s a quote from Twentieth Century Society:

“[A] tragically high quantity of good buildings have been demolished in Slough in recent years, including grand Art-Deco-styled factories by the likes of Wallis Gilbert and high-quality post-war offices. More are to come down as the town tries to erase its past and reinvent itself from scratch. Despite famously heckling Slough, John Betjeman’s praise for the Town Hall’s architecture as ‘a striving for unity out of chaos’ in 1948 has never been so relevant as today. C20 believes that the redevelopment of the Town Hall would be an act of vandalism to the civic centre and is supporting the Campaign to Save Slough’s Heritage in their request for a review of the decision.”

Of course, making the worst of a bad job has been a speciality ever since Betjeman wrote his famous poem inviting ‘friendly bombs’ to land on this “hell” in the 1930s. And yet, during all that time, Slough has also been getting steadily richer and steadily bigger. Something about the place clearly works. Some people clearly like it.

When I was working on the Slough bit of Crap Towns, I actually got quite a bit of positive feedback from people in the town, alongside the dozens of emails slagging it off. One of those correspondents even invited my co-editor and I to look around in the summer of 2003. We took her up on the offer while on an aborted attempt to write a kind of travelogue about Crap Towns in general (working title “To Hull And Back”).

Our tour guide clearly did like Slough. She actually had a very well paid job in the city and was there by choice, since it was a good place to escape the “madness” of the capital, but there wasn’t much she could show us that we liked. Quite a lot of the time was spent with her admitting that things were actually quite ugly, and us trying not to agree too strongly as that would seem incredibly rude. Quite a bit more of the time was spent in awkward silence. After all, what do you talk about with someone with whom your only link is a difference opinion about the town where they filmed the original series of The Office? Especially when you’re crammed into her little car and all too conscious of how badly your feet smell after several days on the road, tramping around the armpits of Britain.

We spent a long time in the car, driving around fairly aimlessly, as I remember. In my notebook I scribbled the following: “buildings sheer edges of cube-shaped office blocks and the bulbous plastic roofs of shopping malls on roads suspended above ground-level on concrete flyovers, curving between the squat buildings like a puny version of Fritz Lang’s vision of the high-rise buildings and layers of sky-highways in Metropolis.”

I wish I knew what that meant. I’m sure at the time it struck me as incredibly grand. I was basically trying to say that it was a bit ugly. The other thing I noted was how grey it was:
The buildings were grey, the bridges were grey, and the roads were grey. If you sliced open the office blocks they would no doubt reveal hundreds of grey men and women wearing grey suits sitting at grey desks.

I also made notes about “the garish reds and yellows of the shop signs and advertising hoardings.” So there must have been some colour. It was just all-artificial.

Eventually, I insisted that we get out of the car. Our guide didn’t like that, saying that people only generally walked in Slough if they were inside a shopping mall – if they had any sense. I realised why pretty quickly. Slough is one of those towns whose designers were convinced that people like nothing better than strolling through dimly lit concrete tunnels. It was a hot day and the sun was cooking up all kinds of bad smells. Piss, predominantly. But also tarmac, petrol and sugar. There was a big Mars Bar factory in Slough in those days and it added just the tinge of nausea to the air to make wondering around in the open(ish) air thoroughly unpleasant.

By this stage, our guide seemed to have defected. When we emerged from the tunnels, she said simply that we “hadn’t seen anything yet” and whizzed us back in the car to an estate of  pebble-dashed houses with boarded up windows clustered around a 16 storey brutalist tower block named, with a characteristic lack awareness, after the romantic poet Byron.

Just down the road from this poor housing were the gigantic hi-tech sheds of the Slough’s rich industrial estates. The money-making ability of these concerns was clear to see from the huge fleets of flash saloon cars gathered in the car parks outside, and the low level electric hum of constant activity and visible bustle within the plate glass windows.

They clearly weren’t splashing the cash on architecture though. The buildings were pretty much porta-cabins – just like the ones in the Ricky Gervais series. They were not, as the best buildings are supposed to be, designed for eternity. Not even tomorrow. They were just stopping places for constantly relocating, upgrading or downsizing companies who had no care for the local environment whatsoever. Betjamen would have written another, even nastier, poem if he had seen them.

I know this is hardly groundbreaking material. Slough is ugly. Everyone knows that. Our guide wasn’t expecting us to like it either. I eventually began to understand that the point she was trying to make was that she liked the place in spite of appearances.  Slough was, she explained, a place where she could feel comfortable, and not just because of inertia and the presence of her family and friends. It was easy to slip into the spirit of the town’s unrelenting blandness, to feel unique and yet at the same time have the sense that nobody expected anything of you. It was an argument I was to hear again and again over the next few months when doing the publicity run for the first book of Crap Towns. There was, as a man in a Slough’s branch of Ottakar’s bookshop explained to me, “a total lack of pretension” in the town and its people.

To illustrate her point, our guide took us out to one of the town’s large parks. It was bland too: flat and scrubby, grass yellowing in the sun and with a half drained concrete duck pond as its centrepiece. But it was also far easier than any of the big London parks. No one was on display here. No flash clothes. No ostentatious displays of Capoeira or martial arts. No hipster picnic parties from scrupulously retro hampers. Just people hanging out and sleeping under trees. I could see that it would provide real relief after a day spent in a high-pressure city job, as Cat had been trying to point out right from when we first met her. Slough, I concluded, is a town where it’s okay to be boring. In fact, it’s positively encouraged. And perhaps that’s what Middle Britain is about. A comforting blend of conformity and anonymity.

Perhaps…

Except there’s a big part of the story that I’m skipping over. I’d revise my conclusions about Slough now. Most people probably don’t like the fact that it’s dull any more than I did. They are there because it provides a good living. Slough’s always been a bit of a moneymaking machine.

Perhaps surprisingly, given the way it looks and feels, Slough isn’t a new town. It even gets a mention in the Domesday book and was a popular coaching stop for people heading west from London for several centuries, but it was only when a railway station was built there in the mid 19th century that the Slough we know and loath really came into being. It became a brick factory. For decades Slough provided a healthy percentage of the bricks that helped to build the Victorian Empire. And as the Empire receded in the 1920s the town developed the country’s first Industrial Estate, with generous tax allowances and relaxed planning laws for industrial concerns that wanted to set up there. When Betjeman wrote his poem huge developments of semi-detached “labour saving” homes had been built to house the workers from the local factories (like the huge Mars complex, which gives the air in the town that uniquely sickly flavour) which were thriving despite the world wide depression. Betjaman hadn’t seen half of it either, because the town almost doubled in size again in the 1950s and 1960s when huge tower block estates to house the thousands bombed out of their homes in London in the Second World War. Since the 1960s, it’s continued to grow fast specialising in ultra-hi-tech progressive industries: a triumph of hardheaded commercialism. According to wikipedia, recent new offices in the town include “those of Nintendo, Black and Decker, Amazon.co.uk and Abbey Business Centres.[27]” It’s also noted that: “Ferrari, Mercedes, Fiat and Maserati now have offices in the town.”

What does all this say about Middle England? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s less of a lifestyle choice than an economic imperative to live somewhere like Slough, so it’s wrong to talk about it in the same way. Maybe the conclusion is that Middle England doesn’t give a stuff about many of the things the so-called middle classes care for…

Or maybe I’ll just have to go to a few more places before I draw any conclusions.

In the track, the “MC” laments the arrival of lattes in a once cheap area, of creatives and professionals coming in hordes, and of bicycles acting as Trojan horses, and of “squatting like its hot”… Reminds me of Hackney when I moved there. Especially the line about someone getting shot outside “a vegan place I frequent”. That happened on my street!

Indeed, I’m just the kind of person that would probably annoy the hell out of Riz MC. Which is a shame because he’s quite good. And sounds much harder than I am.

PS – Thanks to Nikesh Shukla (@nikeshshukla) for tweeting me the link to this song. I’ve recently enjoyed reading his book Coconut Unlimited, so am pleased to have the chance to recommend it here.

PPS You may have seen RizMC playing Omar in the film Four Lions. He is very funny.

PPPS The Slough article is on the way, I promise. I’ve just been rather busy trying to earn the money I need to maintain my bourgeoise lifestyle and espresso habit. A man’s got to eat (Waitrose food), after all.

It struck me that it’s possible to read We’ve Had It So Good as more than just as a summation of the Baby Boomer generation. It also tracks the trajectory of a very particular and very fortunate kind of middle class person.  Stephen and Andrea seemed to mark a kind of high point of middle class existence. Does that seem like a valid reading to you? And were you very aware of class when you were writing the book?

Yes, very much so. The characters are carefully plotted in class terms, they are a group of people who could only have met at university on he 60s and 70s and it was my intention to plot the rise and fall of that particular university-educated middle class who entered the workforce in the early Seventies. It was quite deliberate to put Stephen, Andrea and Ivan all in Islington, a, working class neighbourhood when they arrive there, full of fly-blown corset shops. I remember walking the length of Upper Street in the late Seventies trying to get a cappuccino and no-one knew what I meant. I found a caff with two urns. When I asked for a black coffee, no sugar, I was told that the milk was already in it. ‘This one’s with sugar, this one’s without.’ Each character comes from a particular class niche: Stephen, lower middle-class American, inheritor of the American dream, the vision of classlessness and progress; Andrea the daughter of the English middle-class who did badly after the war because they weren’t in touch with social change, clinging to gentility; Ivan, the son of the archetypal Hampstead lefty intellectuals (based on a family I knew); and Grace, the child of the Home Counties, a marriage crossing the tracks between the upper class wife and the scholarship boy who is going to get on, through education. So all of them arrive at Oxford and have this tremendous start, and rise more or less seamlessly, apart from Grace, the refusnik.

I also got a sense in the novel that this kind of lifestyle is coming to an end. After the high there’s a feeling that things are going to drop off. Without giving too much away, there’s a lot of death in there, the next generation don’t have such an easy time, the foundations upon which, for instance, Andrea’s life are based all seem to have been dismantled by the close. Do you feel that we’re coming to the end of a golden age of the middle classes? And if so, where does that leave us?

It was always my intention to depict a trajectory from youth to late middle age. Yes, all of them suffer a great diminishing, one way or another. It was their certainty that they were born to have nothing but good times happen to them that I wanted to explore.

Following on from that, an extra layer is added by the fact that Stephen is an American who steps into this very British world – but is never entirely assimilated. How was it imagining our British habits, hang-ups and tastes through the eyes of a semi-outsider? Did it reveal things about our way of life that were unexpected?

I needed a) someone who was the epitome of optimism, of the idea of the bright future, and a Californian seemed the best repository for that. But he’s also an outsider who doesn’t even want to be an insider, so it allows him alway to be restless, always to think that there’s something better, and for him to observe Englishness.

(I'll put a proper photo of the book up soon instead of this iphone one. Am just keen to run this interview right away as it's so very nice.)

You clearly also see plenty of the comedy value in the middle class setting. Grace and Ivan, for instance (although both tragic in their own ways) are very funny characters. Are they inherently ridiculous?

I think the only characters who aren’t ridiculous are Andrea and Max. Yes, please feel free to laugh at them. They deserve it, as fond of them as I am.

Elsewhere,  you’ve talked about the toxic-legacy of the Baby Boomer generation in terms of refusing to accept old age. You’ve also suggested that they have failed to appreciate just how lucky they are – and have consequently handed their children a considerably diminished inheritance. Could such criticisms also be expressed in class terms? Is middle class comfort based to a certain extent on ignorance and other the suffering of others?

This is a tricky one. The middle-class baby boomer generation was on the whole the first generation in their families to go to university. They were the product of post-war homes, and of parents who had had their own youth during the Depression and the War. So their parents really wanted the best for them, wanted the new convenience food, the foreign holidays, wanted their children to get on, to prosper. This is a generation, remember, born during rationing. So I don’t think it’s any shame that we grabbed the opportunities and the goodies that came to us. The problem is more the arrogance with which we believed this to be our natural right and our dismissal of the sacrifices our parents made for us. Many was the household where a veteran of the D-day landings was denounced as a fascist by their teenage son or daughter, waving round a copy of Socialist Worker.

As a Booker-nominated, Oxford-educated, Guardian contributing and extremely well-dressed Baby Boomer, you yourself are living what many would see as the middle class dream. Are you?! And how is it from the inside?

I didn’t go to Oxford, I went to York. My background is a little different because I as the child of immigrants. They saw things with simplicity – we want our children to get ahead. we want them to grab everything that’s  to be grabbed, so I don’t have the same feelings of guilt. This is what my parents wanted for my and I respect that. But yes, I went to university on a full grant, yes, I got onto the housing ladder at the tight time . . .

Following on from all that, one of the many big truths that the novel revealed to me is that such categorisations are ultimately flawed. The most important thing about Stephen, Andrea and Grace and co isn’t the way they fulfil a stereotype, but their individuality. As I read, it was their stories that took over. The characters became the most important and emotive elements of the book, not so much the generalisations about a generation.  So is it – in fact – a mistake to talk about middle classes and co in such general terms?

I only ever set out to describe a set of individuals with their own thoughts and feelings, because that’s all literature can do.

Erm, I think this list of questions has just eaten its own tail! So I guess I should break out of the loop to ask if you’re working on anything new. What can we expect from you next?

Next novel, The Englishman at the Door, about a Russian-Jewish businessman who comes to England and tries to buy his way into Englishness.