Classy Quotes 16

Service industry

We've had to divide the cafe into different regions of China, because they don't want to sit with each other. (staff member of Danish auction house catering to Chinese fur buyers)

Only posh people get away with wearing salmon pink trousers. (@pauljmcg)

Only posh people have underfloor heating and olive dishes. (@TeeCee_Baby)

You don't expect farm labourers to have nerves, do you? But they're human, like the rest of us. (A vicar speaking in The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers)

Until the Twenties, “the largest single group of working people in Britain” were in service.  (Roger Lewis in The Times, reviewing Selina Todd's The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class 1910–2010)

I knew clever classmates in South Wales who deliberately flunked the 11-plus because they didn’t want to seem as if they had airs — it would have been class betrayal, treachery to their roots. They knew their place. (I was once beaten up for reading the Radio Times, a middle-class periodical.) (Roger Lewis)

I can’t write about suburbia – I’d have to go and live there. (Martin Amis)

It's about Ferraris, it's about Ming vases, it's about massive tracts of land! (Nicky Campbell on the rich, BBC The Big Questions)

The UK is changing as a whole in terms of class-dependent structure and I think Eton reflects that. When I was there – I am 45 – it was a much more aristocratic place, so some of the criticism would have been true in some elements. But now the school has a very robust academic entry policy. (Old Etonian and dot.com millionaire Brent Hoberman, Times 22 March 2014)

Mummy and Daddy were going to buy a car and some land and enlarge the cottage. But they weren’t going to spoil it with a horrible garage. (Joanna Cannan, A Pony for Jean, 1936)

A certain breed of well-off types are obsessed with poor people having televisions – as if they should huddle around a candle at night singing hymns. (Barbara Ellen, Obs Mar 16 2014)

Not long ago, only rich people had access to pedicures and dog-walkers. Such services were totally unknown to the middle-class families of my childhood. Today, they are essential to most upper-middle-class lives. (Margaret Wente in the Toronto Globe and Mail on the new, freelance “service class” - so unlike the old servant class. She includes chefs who will tutor your nanny in world cuisine, and yard dog-poop cleaners.)

In Denmark a nursery or grandparent was fine. But employing a nanny would be seen as putting on airs. (Times 2014-02-22)

As acclaimed author, academic and working-class child Marshall Berman said of his student days: "The experience of studying at Columbia, Oxford and Harvard was intellectually exciting but socially lonely. They all catered to the rich, to the current and wannabe ruling class, and I felt I didn't fit in." (Guardian Feb 2014)

Pebbledash - do we or don't we?She bought the home at a discount because the exterior was covered in pebbledash, unlike any other properties on the street. Now that it has been returned to the brick exterior the neighbourhood has breathed a collective sigh of relief. (Times May 11, 2012)

[In Hampstead’s posh Crediton Hill] Here a homeowner has fallen foul of tut-tutting neighbours after removing the pebbledash finish on the front of her property in favour of a smooth white render. (Camden New Journal, Feb 2014)

More here, and links to the rest.