Classy Collectibles 3

The next big thing

Art that depicts cannabis leaves... or includes “faux ethnic” carvings is a sign of terrible taste, according to a checklist produced by Grayson Perry. [Also] photorealistic paintings, sculptures that enlarge everyday objects, and anything made of neon tubes. “Then there are collages with dolls’ arms in them,” he told an audience at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. “African airport carvings – you know, faux ethnic. Statues outside football grounds – things that are a little too earnest. ... I passed this shop recently in Leytonstone that had a sign, ‘Neon for art pieces.’ I thought, avant garde is dead.” (Times Oct 2014-10-16)

Modern art appreciation is mainly a form of virtue signalling. You're so sophisticated you don't need beauty like the proles do. (P. D. Mangan ‏@Mangan150)

The days of the copper warming-pan are long since gone. (Philip Serrell)

A recent TV programme, The Extraordinary Collector, showed the rich and those who want to sell them things fawning on each other. Everything is "fantastic" and "lovely" and "marvellous", and when someone shows you the tattiest piece of overpriced rubbish you have to react as if you’ve seen a vision of the Virgin Mary. (The millionaires rarely bought the things.)

Upper-middle-class Samantha Upward is rather surprised that we’re allowed to “see” Victorian stained glass now. She never displays “wall art” that runs across several canvases, and thinks the word “Fayre” should be banned. She is re-distressing her lovingly restored rocking horse and plans to pretend she found it in an old barn.

Very Bohemian Rowena is stockpiling 50s Greek chic (woven shoulder bags, black and gold imitation Greek vases, lots of gold on black, key-patterned dresses). She’s going to call it Griki Culture. She's also collecting very cheap tourist tat from around Europe – Alpine fridge magnets, Pope Francis biros, flamenco dancer coasters, costume dolls from the 50s. And rather lovely pictures, statuettes and china sneeringly dismissed by the experts as “made for the tourist market” circa 1900.

Some middle-middle Weybridges like to collect paraphernalia from the country house lifestyle, such as the Gothic wooden letterbox that stood in the hall. (You posted your letters here, and a footman took them to the postbox.) They try to shoehorn a butler’s pantry into a modern house. (Their equivalents of 100 years ago were nostalgic for medieval castles, old coaching inns and 18th century elegance.)

A rather Teale friend was furious that posh people collected plastic toys – with their money they could collect antiques and art, or at least somethng valuable like miniature silver chairs.

Definitelies who live in caravans collect cut glass and imitation Sevres. They are the last outpost of Louis Quinze, apart from Donald Trump. Young Dave D makes a pile gold-plating stuff for dictators.

More here, and links to the rest.

Café Society

We're expecting a party of six!

About 20 years ago, newspapers and magazines were fond of sending a woman journalist to find out whether it was OK for single women to eat out in restaurants in the evening – now that women have got the vote, and everything. In every place she tried, she would be put in a corner, next to the kitchen, or next to the gents, and eventually the publications gave up.

I wouldn’t try to eat in a restaurant on my own in the evening, but I often eat lunch solo in cafés of all kinds – from posh to midrange to greasy spoon. This is what I’ve learned. Looking at your mobile is allowed, reading a newspaper is tolerated, reading a book is looked on more dubiously. In cafés with wifi, sitting and tapping on a laptop is OK. But nobody seems to like it if you take out a pencil and start doing the crossword, or correcting proofs.

I should add that I am disabled, and once I have sat down, taken off my coat and put down my bags, it takes me some time to reverse the process.

In an Enjoy Café on Stamford Hill I was encouraged to leave by a literal hand under the elbow from the gentle, polite waitress. A lot of bowing and apologising and deference, but she was still throwing me out. (Correcting proofs.)

In a Kings Cross café the waiter started moving tables around me as soon as I sat down. He initially asked me if I would mind moving, or taking my bags off the next-door chair. I was willing, but he changed his mind. However, he moved my second table away to form a pair with another. Eventually he came back and asked me to move into a table for two in a corner. (I never went back, and the place is now SHUT.)

In Newington Green I was asked to move to a table for two in a dark corner – too dark to read the paper. Trendy dangling filament bulbs are not great to read by. ("Expecting a party of six.")

In Green Lanes I was asked to move into a cold, empty back room designed for smoking shisha pipes. (There was plenty of room in the café proper. I stayed where I was.)

In Newington Common I was told – with a bow, a smile and a praying gesture – that they were about to close (in the middle of the afternoon). In Albion Road the proprietor stood in the doorway with a hangdog expression until I noticed him. “About to close” again. (In both venues I had been taking photographs out of the window.)

In Gray’s Inn Road I was asked to move, but then they relented. I stayed on the end of a table for six. I was joined several times by parties of three or four, but they all moved to tables for four as soon as they could. Perhaps they didn’t want me to overhear their conversation.

I’ve read that restaurants put young, attractive or even slightly famous customers in the window. As a single elderly woman I obviously have to be kept out of sight.

Of course there are many establishments which treat everybody well. I return to these, and recommend them, and give them good write-ups on Tripadvisor. But in future I shall know my place: I’ll head straight for the table for two in the corner, and avoid writing with a pencil or taking photographs.

And if you say anything about the music a café is playing, they’ll say: “We’re going to have live music! Jazz! And open in the evenings!” This never happens, fortunately. In fact it usually means that the café shuts or changes hands in a few weeks. I tried a (lovely) Turkish restaurant in Dalston recently and I’m sure they switched the music from Turkish to dull jazz standards as soon as I sat down. I just wish I could find a café like the long-gone Aroma chain that plays music from South America... However, the Café Deux Amis in Judd Street plays Classic FM.

You Are What You Eat 8

From oven to table

In August 2016, falafel and avocado are being used as markers for "utterly middle class". Like “latte sipping”. Latte has been around for about 15 years, we ate falafel at the Israeli café in Charing Cross Road (Gaby’s) in the early 70s, and my parents were trying to force me to eat avocadoes in the 60s,  because middle-class children must eat foreign and unfamiliar food. The haterz just need to bring their references up to date.

Jeremy Paxman made middle class friends at his prep school. When he visited a friend’s home, he was amazed to find “yoghourt” being delivered with the milk – whatever that was. His own father brought home an avocado one day. “We were all rather baffled by it.”

Now, apparently, we’re “obsessed with aubergines” and some chefs are using them instead of pasta sheets in lasagna. The young journalists who write this guff are too young to remember the 70s and Something Bake, particularly mozzarella, tomato and aubergine. It was a trendy version of Seven-Layer Pie.

Does anybody really like the kind of salad that comes in a cardboard box? And how do you eat them without chopping everything up small? And it’s hard to eat anything with plastic cutlery out of a cardboard box. They consist of rocket, grated carrot, grated beetroot, chunks of squash, chunks of pumpkin, all covered with chilli-flavoured dressing and a scattering of nuts and seeds. DIScomfort food.

Very upmarket food comes “plated” - ie it’s turned into a mini work of art with whole leaves of this and that lying on a bed of puree in a pool of coloured liquid. As soon as you start to eat it (and you have to cut up the leaves and the central thing to get them into your mouth), the picture is spoiled and the coloured liquid goes everywhere.

Upwards used to go on (and ON) about how maaahvellous medlars and mulberries were, far superior to strawberries and raspberries (which you can get at any corner shop – or, in the olden days, at any roadside). Whereas with medlars and mulberries you have to own a tree, or know someone who does (and they’re bound to be posh). Ancient mulberries are probably left over from attempts to establish an indigenous silk industry.

The more middle class you are, the less you chop things. Lower-middle-class Teales chop food very small, so it’s easy to eat (thank you, Teales).

“Poshcorn” and “Proper Corn” on sale in a corner shop? They’re not going to make many middle-class sales. And wasn’t gourmet popcorn a few food fads ago?

Prosecco peach jam has been spotted.

Rice pudding is the must-have dessert for 2016.  (BBC Breakfast)

You really can get a chicken tikka Yorkshire pudding in Iceland. (The shop, not the country.)

In many modern eateries the seats are too low.

Nobody eats vegetables in white sauce any more (very Mrs Beeton), which is a pity – the sauce stuck everything together and stopped it falling off your fork. I'm waiting for vegan comfort food. How about cauliflower with tofu, cocoanut and mushroom dressing?

I like to think that posh Stow Crats eat superbly cooked traditional roast and two veg.

From the 1894 White House CookbookDon't, when you drink, elevate your glass as if you were going to stand it inverted on your nose. Bring the glass perpendicularly to the lips, and then lift it to a slight angle. Do this easily.

Drink sparingly while eating. It is far better for the digestion not to drink tea or coffee until the meal is finished. Drink gently, and not pour it down your throat like water turned out of a pitcher.
I remember a type of woman from the 60s and 70s: smiley, brisk, in her forties or fifties, rather well off, with a second home. She had short grey hair and a tan from sailing, and dressed in big cotton jerseys, sailcloth trousers and deck shoes. She made vast batches of pies and casseroles and put them into giant chest freezers (one in each house) so that when her children and friends or guests came to stay she didn’t have to cook, but could just whisk something out and defrost it.

She had a modern kitchen with a lot of pale blue flowery curtains, trays and biscuit jars. (And "oven to table" casserole dishes.) She liked to sit at her (pale blue, wipe-clean) kitchen table drinking instant coffee out of a mug and chatting. She didn’t make a big fuss about laying tables, either. Food was served buffet style, napkins were paper. After the meal, everything was shoved in the dishwasher. It was the modern way, rational and practical when servants had departed.

It was much too practical for Upwards who were still trying to maintain their class position with Georgian silver, cut glass and linen tablecloths and huge amounts of fuss and bullying – but she tended to be a bit of a Stow Crat. They are much more practical and hard-headed, and also don’t have to worry about keeping up with the Joneses. They are also used to adapting what they’ve got (huge inherited houses) to changing times. Also you can’t fit chandeliers and Georgian silver into a sailing boat. And Upwards of the time didn’t want to sit around and chat – unpleasant home truths might have come out. And it was too enjoyable – bound to be bad for you.


When will we reach peak café? There always were cafés, but respectable people couldn’t go to them – they were full of working class people! (Respectable people flocked to tea shops – but could a MAN really drink tea in a tea shop?) No wonder the respectable people were so shocked by the teenage café culture of the 50s and early 60s, when “coffee bars” were trendy. As were outré sandwich fillings like bacon and banana, cream cheese and date...

More here, and links to the rest.

Classy Schools and Careers

Grayson Perry: networking

The clearly glaring gap in the English system is that of social class. The relationship between parental wealth and background and children’s educational outcomes is particularly strong. (Becky Francis, Professir of Education and Social Justice)

I hated school. I hated Stockport. The school I went to had perhaps ideas above its station, in terms of the type of school it should be: a grammar school that thought that kind of emotionally illiterate, highly didactic method of teaching was righteous, because it somehow separated the wheat from the chaff. In other words, kids who could learn that way were clever and worthy, and kids that couldn’t were stupid and unworthy. (John Amaechi)

For decades the belief among many educated by the state was that the arrogance and sense of entitlement that is instilled at public school secured the best jobs and highest pay. That has been debunked, however, with a study concluding that those with the best education get the most pay, and that bluster counts for little... Character traits that may impress employers were, in many cases, already held by the children at the age of ten, before they went through the independent school system... Money spent on schemes that built the confidence and aspirations of state-school pupils would be better off focused solely on improving the education they received. (Nicola Woolcock, 2015)

Recent articles complain that a two-tier system at university is expanding the class divide. The richer students live in more luxurious accommodation and never mix with the less well-off in more basic halls. When I was at university in the 70s, there was a small enclave of upper-middle-class students. They thought I might be one of them, but weren’t quite sure. They tried me out, and decided I wouldn’t do – I wore a pink nylon scarf and made friends with whoever wanted to be friends with me. One of my best friends was even American. The enclave lived in large houses in town, or in outlying villages, and drove in to the campus, where they spent as little time as possible.

Per Toby Young, in the 80s working-class undergraduates at Oxford were known as “stains”. His contemporaries disagree: they were known as “northern chemists”.

And what about when you graduate? Social mobility can only succeed if it fails. What would happen if the entire working class became middle class and wanted graduate jobs? Of course it’s never going to happen, there aren’t enough university places and white-collar jobs for a start. What the middle classes really mean by “increased social mobility” is “We’ll cream off a few more of the really intelligent, useful ones and get them on our side.”

But of course the college tells you that a degree will help you get an interesting, highly paid job. They want your fees. Make sure you aren't being qualified for a field that doesn't exist, has disappeared, or is now over-crowded.

When I was at university, “entrepreneur” wasn’t a career choice. Now it is. It’s passed the parent test. Which is a big zeitgeist change. In other words, if you tell your parents you want to be an entrepreneur, they think, “Great”. Whereas previously, they thought you were nuts. (Public schoolboy and businessman Brent Hoberman)

One of the changes that happened in my adult life was the vanishing of the idea of safe careers. Nowadays, if you say, 'My son is in television,' people no longer grip the chair with white knuckles. (Julian Fellowes in the NYT)

Somerset Maugham’s uncle rejected the Civil Service, not because of the young man's feelings or interests, but because his uncle concluded that it was no longer a career for gentlemen, since a recent law had required all applicants to pass an entrance examination. (Wikipedia)

In my day going into business after graduating – for yourself or anybody else – was just not on the cards. It was never mentioned. At university there was something called the “milk round” (visits from firms which needed graduates), but it was never suggested we should put our names down or even find out what jobs they were offering. It was trade.

Publishing and writing were “gentlemen’s careers”, ie you needed private means to pursue them. Most of the French Impressionists and avant-gardists had private means – and sneered at Douanier Rousseau for having a job. They called him a “petit bourgeois” and elaborated a “funny anecdote” about a dinner given in his honour where he was ridiculed and humiliated. And they ripped off his art.

A hipster is someone who can charge middle class prices for a working class job. (Karl Sharro ‏@KarlreMarks)

Hippies were supposed to live by going with the flow, letting it all hang out, opening their minds, sharing everything, so if they were selling you sandwiches they couldn’t just be selling you sandwiches - it must be a happening, or an experience, or something….

Hipsters have pulled off the same trick: they’ve persuaded punters that their businesses aren’t really businesses but art projects, spiritual experiences, distillations of the zeitgeist, a totally new way of relating, a meeting place of rare spirits – or somesuch garbage. Hipster cafes are cafés, their shops are shops, their businesses exist to make money. The “hipness” is just set dressing, and there’s even a chain furnished from a warehouse full of old school desks etc.

Gentlemen are not supposed to want to make lots of money – you’re supposed to have it already. Nobody ever talks about the advantages of having money and contacts (social capital) when you start out in any business or profession. Or marrying money. Apart from Grayson Perry – he advises going to all art show openings and being incredibly charming to everybody. Add “social skills” and “good looks” to the list.


Here’s some advice from a friend (ML):

I've had a few clients over the years who have started a retail adventure. The thing is it is dead hard to make a living out of a single shop.

a. gift shop near Huntingdon selling all sorts of very nice things, like bits of arty decoration, furniture, rugs. She struggled on until the lease ran out but essentially the shop made a contribution towards the rent and her husband had to find the rest.

b. gift shop near Baldock or one of those hell holes up the A1 in Hertfordshire. Sold nice wicker furniture and other nice decorationy things. Struggled on for a while. One partner left and the other carried on until, apparently, a tear in the space-time continuum caused the whole thing to vanish one day. At least that's how it seemed because it just disappeared.

c. mobile phone shop... They had to pay for the phones up front and wait months to get the sign up commissions.

d. off license somewhere in Hertfordshire, just not enough volume and while she was closed evening/weekend Tesco were still flogging it.

e. video shop in Cambridge. This was in VHS days. They couldn't compete with Blockbuster (who moved in two doors down) but survived for a while by developing a speciality (Kung Fu movies).

They all end in tears. The problem is:
1. If you are selling something mainstream like baked beans or bog roll then you can't match Tesco/Aldi prices because you can't get the discounts from the wholesalers.
2. If you are selling something nice but not really necessary then people don't need to buy it and so you are the first expense to be cut when times is 'ard.
3. Before you get any profit there is the rent/rates/gas/electric/staff/stock to pay for and they are all hideously expensive.

Was he the one who said that people come in and look at handmade things and go "Ooooh, lovely!" and then go and buy something mass-produced?

I'll say it again: if I had children I'd send them to butler school.

The expanding ranks of billionaires worldwide are creating a new market for more esoteric services: publicists, pilots, nutritionists, super-tutors, floral architects... (And social-media contractors to monitor and curate your children’s online lives. One family advertised for a butler who could drive a horse and carriage to transport his guests.) (Times, 2015)

The arrival of so much wealth provides opportunities to the quick-witted. Careers that might not have appeared  financially rewarding 30 years ago have begun to wear a different face. (Clive Aslet, Times 2015 on the arrival in London of “ultra high net worth individuals”.)

Step forward art dealers, estate agents and tutors, says Aslet. But apparently the most popular careers are writer, academic, librarian – is this because middle class young people want to impress others they meet at parties? Working with books gives you a sackful of middle-class Brownie points. If you work in the City, or as an industrial chemist, you’ll never be invited to the right dinner parties, and won’t meet the kind of partner who’ll impress other people at parties.

When I worked as a temp, I wondered why some people kept asking me to come back when I was clearly useless – they wanted someone with a posh voice to answer the phone.

More here, and links to the rest.

Classy Quotes 23

As a family we did not number doctors, dentists, bank managers or similar worthies in our circle. No one in the immediate family had been to university. But my father was a naval officer, and while Mum’s father had started out as a travelling salesman, he ended up with his own canning factory and a small country estate in North Yorkshire. (Jeremy Paxman)

Middle class values include loving privacy and self determination then criticising working class communities for not being communal enough. (Matthew Whitfield ‏@mwhitfield80)

Residents of Kensington Palace Gardens feared being swamped by “the masses” if their street joined a cycling network, newly released letters reveal. Transport for London’s plans for a “Quietway” through one of the capital’s most expensive roads were shelved last month after residents complained that it would ruin their “tranquillity” and pose security risks. (Evening Standard)

If the requirement was [for schools] to take 80% disadvantaged, middle-class parents would avoid because what is most desired is social selection. (Ros McMullen ‏@RosMcM)

Doesn't 'toff' translate as 'someone who sounds posher than me'? (And the unmentionable 'p' word as 'someone who sounds more common than me'?) (AG)

She learned about being nice in her two years at college... Her fellow students were “the nicest and most reasonable individuals I had ever met... That’s what being middle-class-in-the-world is about. Darkness is managed or hidden.” “It's about being sensible... You can’t let yourself go... except when you do.” (Carolyn Steedman reviews Respectable by Lynsey Hanley in the LRB 2016)

A parlourmaid giving evidence to the government inquiry (into the “servant crisis” in the 20s) explained that she had suffered ‘untold misery’ because invitations to parties warned her not to admit what she did for a living. Her friends didn’t want their friends to ‘mix with servants’. (She left Belvoir Castle and went to work for Agatha Christie, who was very fond of her. LRB July 2016. Christie herself sometimes joked that if the writing didn't pan out she could always get a job as a parlourmaid.)

Leadsom deciding to spend more time with her National Trust oven gloves. (FB)

The publication had been a home for people who valued culinary expertise, wrote Kimball—a place with “respect for those who had earned the chops, as it were, who had a lifetime of good breeding and experience in order to stand at the cultural helm.” (Cooks Illustrated on the demise of Gourmet magazine)

It is well known that height is correlated with economic power. (LRB May 2016)

When I joined The Bookseller, I'd be asked 'which college' I went to. Took a while before realised it was Oxbridge college. (Danuta Kean ‏@Danoosha)

British middle-class Hell is a permanent signal failure, with the stalled train's passengers tutting quietly at the futility of it all. (Musa Okwonga ‏@Okwonga)

It never occurred to me to think I wasn’t a gentleman until Lady Burghclere pointed it out. (Evelyn Waugh)

Interview with Viscount Linley, Times June 2016-06-05

I ask what TV he watched growing up.
“There wasn’t any.”
No telly?
“My father put tinfoil over the front of it.”
So it looked like a jacket potato?
“So it mirrored our image. He said, ‘Now you can see how idiotic you look.’”
That’s so wonderfully snobby. Were you allowed tomato ketchup?
“No.”

More here, and links to the rest.

Classy Childcare

Poor little mites

Upwards think they are excused having children who behave like children.

Middle classes of all stripes despise babies’ dummies.

If children are “resilient” we can be as cruel as we like to them and it won’t matter. And there's always some reason why we should be cruel to them:

Thomas Mann justified spoiling his eldest child over his 5 others with the line, "One should get the children used to injustice early." (AdamNathanielFurman @Furmadamadam)

The Fortean Times ran a piece on the abusive way the Greeks and Romans raised their children. Someone commented: “No wonder the Romans were cold, callous, sexually precocious and impulsive.” (Paraphrase.)

Middle class parents have a strange impulse to teach very very small children “how to grow their own crops” (and try unfamiliar foods, know where food comes from, eat with a knife and fork, manage risk, say please and thank you, understand money, and generally behave like a middle-aged adult). They really do wring their hands over the fact that “children today don’t know where food comes from”. It comes from the supermarket, you noodle. But they have to reinvent children + food x angst = guilt every few months so that they can keep ahead of the other parents. Turning up at parties with boxes of unsweetened vegan food which are all that poor little Milo is allowed to eat is sooooo five minutes ago.

David Cameron said we need “tiger mothers” to encourage children to study, and “character” modules to teach children “resilience” and “perseverance”.

Letter to Times Jan 2016-01-14
Sir, Whatever happened to having supportive parents? Mine were supportive and encouraging, and I seemed to turn out all right. Tiger parenting does not help children as adults: it usually results in low self-esteem, failure to cope when life doesn’t go right and an inability to be independent. What happens when children fail to meet David Cameron’s “high expectations”? Tiger parenting is a short-term solution to the long-term raising of a child. Bronwyn Molony, Dublin

Even during the holidays I saw very little of them: They would be in another part of the house while I would stay upstairs... My mother hardly ever came to my attic floor, but I could hear her running her bath... my world was the staff. They were my only friends. (Redeeming Features, Nicky Haslam on his “privileged” childhood in a stately home)

As a new biography of Evelyn Waugh is published (Philip Eade, Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited), a former Times theatre critic tells the story of the novelist’s first wife, his mother, Evelyn Nightingale (Times June 2016)

Her troubles began with her birth in Charles Street, Mayfair, in 1903, since she was meant to be a boy and heir to a new title in danger of becoming extinct... She was the last of four daughters.

As she always said, it was a different era with different ideas about upbringing, yet seldom can a girl have been so neglected. Evelyn never went to school but was semi-educated by a series of mostly German governesses, one of whom, she recalled, stuck pins in her arms if she rested them on the table. And she seldom saw her father, who died when she was 17, remembering a benignly aloof figure...

But then she was kept away from him by a mother she found terrifying. “One could never explain one’s presumed misdemeanours because the words froze in one’s mouth or didn’t get as far as freezing,” she wrote in an informal memoir many years later, adding that Lady Winifred never came into the nursery or schoolroom. “There were no goodnights, loving or otherwise, or prayers being heard at bedtime.”

Her greatest friends, she wrote, were the servants, who were “kindly and understanding”, though she was forbidden to play with their children. And her greatest love was for her nanny, a tiny, gentle woman who was sacked when Evelyn was seven...

[In her own words:] I felt “as it were in a cage with no knowledge of the world or the real behaviour of others.”

[She became a Bright Young Thing – no wonder they were so aimless and self-destructive and amoral. After her two divorces, her sister cut her off almost entirely.]

The four Johnson children mostly just had each other. They read constantly. Rachel can’t remember any playdates. It sounds as if the parenting regime was one of benign neglect, which is perhaps why all the Johnsons so crave attention now. “Our parents provided us with the essentials, then got on with their own lives,” is how she puts it. (Times on Rachel Johnson, June 2015)

Middle class neglect is always called “benign neglect”. There’s nothing benign about it.

It’s a Tory trope at the moment that children must be taught to “take responsibility”, otherwise they’ll grow up to be “victims”. Apparently there are no perpetrators, only people who think they are victims, when actually their plight is ENTIRELY their own fault. (If this is true, why aren’t assault victims prosecuted and sent to jail, while their attackers go free? And when someone breaks into your house and steals your stuff, why don’t you just turn yourself in?)


More here.

Transports of Delight

On many modes of mass transit, people have long been divided into classes based on how much they can afford to pay.

The 1930s, when trams were looked down on as transport for hoi polloi. (Roger Nuttall)

People are thinking of driving less. (according to Twitter)

I once shared a flat in East London with some snobs who would only get fish and chips from the Seashell in Lisson Grove (several miles away). They looked down on me for getting local takeaways. They hadn’t worked out – or refused to see – that I hadn’t got a car and couldn't drive across London just to get some chips.

I can’t drive. This bothers some people.

I was also asked to bring a suitcase back to London (that someone had left behind), when I’d arrived by train and would presumably be leaving the same way, carrying my own luggage. One Christmas I was given a huge set of terracotta serving dishes – I never returned to Wiltshire for them.

Other friends were mortified that I travelled by bus, bullied me to learn to drive, and urged me to get a bicycle. The tube (hot, crowded) is somehow OK. Buses on the other hand are full of common people, and you have a lovely view of places middle class people are not allowed to know about.

When you’re underground, you can’t see the places you’re travelling through. So you can get the tube somewhere acceptable and familiar, and get out somewhere acceptable and familiar. And you have somehow not gone through the places in between.

How dared I live somewhere not near a tube station? How else could they place me on the class map?

Also if I had a car I wouldn’t have to live near a bus stop, which would be on a high street full of Costcutters – I could live in a Victorian conversion down a leafy avenue (dark and scary at night).

They were so sure they knew what was best for me – why was that? They also thought I ought to be married to a barrister and living in Fulham. Single women can’t help letting the class side down: we can't afford the lifestyle, the address or the dinner parties.

Actually Mayor Ken Livingstone vastly improved transport to North London – more 73s, and hopper buses that cross East to West. No wonder the middle classes  are moving in… Night buses and the new revived overground have made a difference too.

Bicycles
Beloved of hipsters and people in Stokey (with pod/trailer for the baby). Stokey dads also like baby buggies that look like lawnmowers. And their kids ride wooden tricycles. Or “dandy horses” – like a bike but with no pedals.

Definitelys ride the latest shape and style – they steal them from Weybridges. Upwards ride either a) the latest shape, style, fashion and technology or b) a deliberately old fashioned sit up and beg bike with a basket for your shopping, lecture notes or dog.

Cars
I suspect there are different kinds of car, and the one you buy speaks volumes about you to someone who knows the language. I can just about tell apart a people carrier, a Chelsea tractor, a limo and a bubble car. There must be some kind that looks cool but really brands you as a vulgarian…

But of course if you move to the country (the dream of all London-dwelling Upwards) you have to be able to drive. Just don’t forget that one day you might have to give up driving… Upwards think that they ought to live in the country – in a village, not a country town. And definitely not in Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool or Birmingham.

Nouveau Richards drive bespoke Rollses with built-in champagne sets and cigar humidors.
Upwards could never drive something called a “minivan”.

Some men have long discussions about the amount of space you should leave between you and the car in front and how every other driver gets it wrong and why.

Posh people don’t clean their cars – outside or in. Teales and Weybridges have car hoovers.

In the 60s, stout middle-aged ladies rode motor scooters, wearing a grim expression, a tweed skirt and a special very uncool peaked scooter helmet that buttoned under the chin.

Horses
I was waiting for hipsters to bring back the horse and cart (I’m sure there are some who commute up and down the Lea by kayak). But horses are terminally unhip, thanks to their popularity with Stow Crats and Weybridges. Nouveau Richards buy a big place in the country with stables, paddock and indoor riding school (manege). Which everybody calls a “menage” now.

Trains
Are full of teenagers, old people, families with small children, and tourists with too much luggage who get on at Gatwick and have a loud conversation about what fun it is to ride on a train for a change. Would be great if they weren’t full of people. Used to have first, second and third class. Punch ran jokes about common people getting into first by mistake (I say Bert, we’re all among the toffs!) or featuring a timid middle class traveller abroad finding himself among peasant women with chickens. In wartime morale-raiser movies everybody travels together in crowded carriages where you may be handed a baby or a beer bottle. Quiet carriages and family carriages are the new second and third class.