Classy Quotes Part Nine

Like bankers, landlords have mythical evil status among a certain class of Guardian readers, who seem to think anyone who has had a bit of success has done so by sacrificing babies at full moon. Letter to Guardian Money 11 Feb 12

I had a friend who wore pearls all the time, thinking she looked elegant. She spoke of eloquently of music, travel, fashion, cuisines and tried to speak a French word or two. She managed to get into parties and certain social circles. elegantwoman.com

A lot of Britain's problems are encapsulated in the very fact that politicians feel perfectly comfortable pontificating so patronisingly about "ordinary people" at all. Yet they all do it. Labour even boasts that it's "ordinary people" that the party exists to champion. Deborah Orr, Guardian January 2012

Reminds me of an overheard at the open-air art show in Hampstead. Cute little girl, about five, looking at pictures: "Oh Mummy, here's an effective one!" (Friend RN writes)

John Lanchester braves the shopping hell that is Oxford Street Guardian headline 16 Dec 2011

Clissold House café, run by Company of Cooks, will sell "beef and horseradish stew and leek and Barkham blue tart". It will also sell "curious cakes such as beetroot & seed and orange & lavender" @northsixteen (After a "class war", it has promised to sell cheaper food including beans/cheese on toast.)

To put my Peppa-mania into context; when I was growing up I wasn't allowed to watch what my mother sniffily referred to as "commercial television", a marvellous snootiness I have nursed ever since when it comes to my children, partly because I was reared on BBC 2 worthiness, and partly because it prevents them hyperventilating over adverts for electronic toys I'm too mean to buy them. Daily Telegraph Dec 2011

Richmond - an affluent suburb of London that was quickly changing from old money into a ghetto for post-apartheid South African exiles, American business execs and semi-retired rock stars. I think my mother was the last working-class person to grow up in Richmond. There should be some sort of plaque on her old house. Age of Uncertainty, March 2012

Part Eight here. More here, here, here, here and here. And here. And here.

Doctor, doctor!

A very grand woman goes to a psychoanalyst. He says: “Now I want you to say whatever comes into your head.” She replies: “I was just thinking what a common little man you are.”Surveys show support for alternative medicine is “more likely among well-educated, upper middle-class women” in the US and Australia, says Cosmos magazine.

Middle-class Samantha Upward complains that doctors use too many military metaphors, but talks about people “battling” cancer. She and her friend Eileen Weybridge from Surrey also “fight off” colds by taking paracetamol (which makes them feel better but does nothing to shorten the cold).

Sam supports alternative therapies and can’t follow the logic behind double-blind trials - she thinks they’re a conspiracy and can’t understand why doctors don’t prescribe placebos if they work so well. She says antibiotics “only suppress the symptoms” because she doesn’t read the instructions to finish the course even if you feel better. When she feels better, she stops taking the tablets and the symptoms come back (because the bugs that cause the symptoms haven’t all been killed and are now breeding again). She doesn’t mind revealing that she doesn’t know what “antibiotic” means. She’s very against treating symptoms because you should be treating the whole person and besides suffering is good for you.

She won’t do what doctors tell her, either, because she’s a member of the boss class and it’s her job to tell others what to do. No wonder she’s hopeless with computers, and can’t put IKEA furniture together or learn a skill.

Forty years ago, Upwards had a theory that all symptoms were caused by toxins working their way out of the system. So you should never take Imodium for diarrhoea. They used to be contemptuous of people who took “patent medicines” (probably over the counter aspirins). The were outraged by the idea that people could just go and buy something that would make their pain go away. Why weren’t these things being rationed by Upwards? Why weren’t Upwards in control?

When women writers for The Guardian have a baby they are the first person in the history of the world to undergo the experience: “All my life I’ve been used to being in control—at school, passing exams, university, relationships, planning my career!” And now they’re being bossed about by common nurses and midwives, and in the grip of a natural process.

When Sam’s friends are ill, they have to be positive because it’s faith that cures you. They have to have a story to tell about going to a homeopath and encouraging the body to heal itself because of course they “don’t want to take drugs all their lives”. (It may just be a story.)

Elderly Weybridges despise those who “go to the doctor for every little thing”. They decide their ailment is minor, and they refuse to understand that their taxes pay the doctor’s salary, and if nobody ever consulted him he’d be out of a job. Lower middle class Jen Teale doesn’t want to “bother” the doctor, and is afraid of wasting his time. But some Weybridges can turn any health chat into a discussion of waiting times. They join health insurance schemes like BUPA that promise waiting rooms like hotel lobbies and a whole hour with the doctor.

Sam agrees that doctors don't give you enough time. She can’t afford BUPA, but she’ll go to any alt. practitioner who’ll listen to her. The NHS is too democratic — anyone can get the same treatment — except that if you are a Guardian reader doctors tell you much too much about your ailment. Also doctors know better than you and may tell you to lose weight, drink less and give up smoking. They aren't paid to massage your ego, but you can always pay an alt. medic to do that. Homeopathy is better than the NHS because you get a half-hour chat about the uniqueness of you. Plus it’s a treatment you have chosen.

For Upwards, illness is a wonderful opportunity to feel guilty for being weak enough to be ill in the first place. Even though they love being in control, many Upwards can’t be ill unless someone in authority tells them they are. Or else they suffer from Reverse Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy - they won’t let anybody else be ill, either. They accuse each other of having "sniffles" rather than real flu, and may send their friends to psychotherapists to find out “why they chose to be ill”. Fatalists they are not.

Posh Stow Crats and Upwards loved the word “neurotic” and loved using it as a stick to beat each other with. Upwards in particular should never have been allowed near the word “psychosomatic” – what Stow Crats call “making a silly fuss”.

Gideon Upward refuses to go to bed when ill but hangs around the house waiting for any passing female to treat him like a baby, because that’s what his mother did. Jen infantilises any patient and uses words like “meddy” and “tummy” – or even “tum-tum”.

Jen eats probiotic yoghourt. Like the women in the ads, she uses the genteel euphemism “bloating” for constipation. She’s not ashamed of using Buttercup cough syrup, with its nauseating advertising jingle. Sam calls it “cough mixture”, Caroline Stow-Crat “cough medicine”.

Jen says self-righteously: “I don’t take tablets.” Caro calls them pills, Sam calls them “drugs”, and thinks they’re all the product of a conspiracy by pharmaceutical companies to medicalise life - and sometimes she’s right. Eileen refers to her “medication”. Caro still believes health myths that are 50 years out of date – Vitamin C cures colds, aspirins help you sleep, but you shouldn’t take painkillers because you’ll get “used to” them, and when you really need them they won’t work. Or do you become dependent on them? (This may be a folk memory of times when laudanum was available over the counter.) Very posh people fall for “marvellous little men” operating weird black boxes, and trust anyone with an address in Harley Street.

All classes go into work with terrible colds and give them to everybody else on the tube, train and bus and in the office, despite advice to the contrary. They hope their colleagues will tell them to go home and take some days off, but they have to prove their genuine illness first. If they call in sick, they put on a croaky voice even if they’ve got appendicitis or ingrowing toenails. This is so the colleague on the other end of the phone can say “Yes, you do sound a bit rough.” If Jen’s embarrassed to explain what’s wrong with her, she says she’s got a migraine. (If you don’t have an explanation, your colleagues will think you aren’t ill at all, so you have to be prepared with a) symptoms and b) how you are treating them. Of course it’s easy to make all this up. Cue anecdotes about employees who insisted on taking their entire quota of sick days as of right.)

Say It With Flowers

If middle-class Samantha Upward gives people flowers she has them wrapped in paper, not cellophane.

It’s difficult to find bouquets that aren’t in trendy colours like purple and green (including ornamental cabbage) which are probably grown in the third world and involve air miles and a union-less labour force. In the 80s Samantha loved flowers hand-dried in a shed in Norfolk by somebody with a double-barrelled surname, especially those giant seed heads. They were a terrible dust trap and were eventually thrown out never to be replaced.

According to John O'Farrell in Things Can Only Get Better, in the 80s some people were so politically correct that they thought flowers were right-wing. I really did know someone who thought cut flowers were murder.

Eileen Weybridge, or possibly her husband Howard, creates elaborate arrangements with dead leaves and red berries that last all winter. Nature morte, or what Sam sneeringly calls “dead life”. Bryan Teale buys Jen a bunch of daffodils from a street stall or petrol station. She cuts off the ends and puts them in a plain glass square vase and may call them “blooms”. Her women’s magazines used to have flower-arranging tips but now they’re just full of celebrity gossip. She also has a floor vase with sticks or curly twigs that she bought at a knick knack shop near the London Dungeon. Eileen puts rosebuds in a green glass bud vase.

Pound shops still sell plastic flowers, so somebody must be buying them. Slightly passé cafés and unsuccessful businesses have papery fake greenery impersonating trees in a tub in the foyer or creepers around the dado. The cafés also have lustre-cum-marble tiles and diamond-shaped mirrors. And the failing businesses have 20-year-old pink and grey carpet tiles. They'll get "listed" status one day (maybe not the carpet tiles).

The Definitelies leave bunches of flowers (still wrapped in cellophane) outside royal residences and at the sites of local murders with handwritten messages (MISS U 4EVER UR A STAR IN HEVEN LIL ANGEL). The Upwards shudder and write complaining articles in the broadsheets. It offends them on several counts:

showing emotion in public
caring about someone you don't know
plastic is unnatural and made of chemicals
it looks untidy
it reminds them that the non-Upwards they share these islands with are far more numerous than they are

“Public sentiment has evolved its own crude form [of mourning] – bouquets are left in their cellophane to show they were shop-bought, not humble cut flowers. This un-English sentimentality dates, of course, to the mass hysteria that followed Diana’s death, when Kensington palace was turned into a charnel house of putrescent daffs.” Spectator, July 31 2004

You Are What You Eat III

Middle-class Upwards all go on the January detox because we all drink and eat too much in December – don’t we? But it’s not enough to give up drink – they insist on going on very exclusive diets. Exclusive as in “excluding most food groups”. They spend January munching a mixture of swedes, lentils and pumpkin seeds washed down with spring water, which makes them miserable and depressed. They keep falling off the wagon and eating chocolate biscuits washed down with chardonnay but their spirit, their self-image and their reputation have had a massive hit of Puritanism and they’ve had the fun of boring on (and on, and on and ON) about it and even writing articles about it in the broadsheets. They don't really like self-denial, but they love the attention-seeking. (But isn't it just what we used to call a "slimming diet"?)

Sam still suffers a faint twinge of Puritanism when she hears or reads of somewhere being a holiday destination because of its “great restaurants”. She knows we’ve moved on from “food is just fuel for the body”, and plain boiled cabbage, potatoes and cold mutton, but… visiting somewhere just for the food? Are we allowed to do that? Even though we fuss about food 25% of the time? (That may be a junk statistic.)

Upwards also shudder at the American use of “restaurant” to mean a fast-food joint. You dress up to go to a restaurant, and expect to find polite waiters who treat you like members of the aristocracy, velvet-covered chairs, linen napkins and French food. Otherwise you specify the country of origin. You expect Italian and Greek places to be cheaper and more relaxed, but they’re still restaurants. Chinese restaurants are quite downmarket unless you go for a region, like Szechuan Cuisine (this may be rather 80s). Upwards and Weybridges haven’t quite got to grips with Japanese restaurants - there may not be any in Winchester – but Teales are game. They’ve come a long way since they regarded pizza and paella with suspicion in the 70s.

Upwards also wince whenever an acquaintance says they have “given up dairy”. It’s “dairy products” - but you can’t say that either, because only someone trying to sell you something would use the word “product”. Falling for silly diets is a middle class thing – they can afford the expensive nutritionist who tells all his clients to give up dairy, gluten and relatives of the deadly nightshade. (It used to be leavened bread and alcohol, as all clients were diagnosed with candidiasis. Next year, who knows?)

Doctors recently advised us to drink moderately, eat sensibly and exercise all year round - but where's the fun in that?

Part One here.
Part Two here.

Conformists, Nonconformists and...

In the early 60s, Mad Magazine could read us like a book. Only a few details have changed. Hummingbird on toast, anyone?

According to Psychologists, most of us clods prefer to follow the “herd instinct” – that is, we prefer to think look and act alike – which makes us CONFORMISTS!

Now and then, however, a few clods with imagination break away from the “herd” – and try hard to think, look and act different – which makes them all NON-CONFORMISTS!

Only nowadays, more and more clods are trying to be different, so there are more and more NON-CONFORMISTS. And all these NON-CONFORMISTS are so busy CONFORMING to not being CONFORMISTS they all wind up CONFORMING to their NON-CONFORMISM!

All except for a small group of bravely idiotic MAD readers – to whom this article is dedicated – mainly because, in this article, we explain in nauseating detail…

HOW TO BE A MAD NON-CONFORMIST

PETS
ORDINARY CONFORMISTS raise parakeets, cocker spaniels, boxers, collies, turtles, snakes, cats, white mice, snakes and tropical fish.

ORDINARY NON-CONFORMISTS raise Russian wolfhounds, French poodles, Weimaraners, ocelots, minks, deodorized skunks and rhesus monkeys.

MAD NON-CONFORMISTS raise ant colonies, anteaters, falcons, leeches, octopi, anchovies, water buffaloes and performing fleas.

MOVIES
ORDINARY CONFORMISTS go in for uninspired Technicolor musicals, stories with happy endings, migraine-provoking Cinemascope, and 6 1/2-hour double features that destroy the eyes, ears, nose, and spine.

ORDINARY NON-CONFORMISTS patronize stuffy out-of-the-way movie houses that show "experimental" films, arty-type films, documentaries, and obscure foreign language pictures with the sub-titles in pidgin Swahili.

MAD NON-CONFORMISTS enjoy hand-cranked penny arcade machines which contain film classics like the Dempsey-Firpo fight, Sally Rand's Fan Dance, old Ben Turpin comedies, and Tom Mix pre-adult westerns.

MUSIC
ORDINARY CONFORMISTS
...play insipid show scores, dismal pop tunes conducted by Jackie Gleason, sickening dance music by Guy Lombardo, rock n’ roll hits by Ricky and Elvis, and occasional works of Gershwin and Tchaikovsky on complicated hi-fi sets.

ORDINARY NON-CONFORMISTS
...play obscure folk songs sung by obscure folk, dull chamber music played in dull chambers, Wagnerian operas in their entirety, Gregorian chants, and readings of minor Welsh poets on super-complicated hi-fi sets.

MAD NON-CONFORMISTS
...play bird calls, tap dancing and exercise lessons, transcriptions of Senate Committee hearings, Gallagher and Shean, The Singing Lady, and theme music from famous monster movies on easy-to-operate hand-wound victrolas.

CLOTHING
ORDINARY CONFORMISTS
…wear narrow-shouldered charcoal-grey Ivy league Suits, button-down shirts with tight collars, silly caps, cramped Italian style shoes. Females wear Empire dresses and shoes with spike heels that constantly break off.

ORDINARY NONCONFORMISTS
…wear sloppy-looking sweatshirts, grimy blue jeans, arch-crippling sandals, and scratchy beards. Among the females of this group, leotards are usually substituted for blue jeans, and the scratchy beards are optional.

MAD NONCONFORMISTS
…wear smart-looking MAD straitjackets, glamorous opera capes, roomy knickers, comfortable Keds, and light-weight pith helmets which offer good protection in bad weather and provide storage space for the day’s lichee nuts.

READING
ORDINARY CONFORMISTS
… waste their time reading banal best sellers, trashy whodunits, dull popular magazines, sensational daily newspapers and commuter timetables.

ORDINARY NONCONFORMISTS
…go for childish science fiction novels and scientific magazines, arty paperbacks, boring literary journals, and anthologies of avant-garde poetry.

MAD NONCONFORMISTS
….read The Roller Derby news, the pre-Civil War congressional Record, old Tom Swift books, and back copies of classfied telephone directories.

FOOD
ORDINARY CONFORMISTS
…prefer meals like on menu below:

Sam’s Chop House
tomato juice
celery and olives
vegetable soup
sirloin steak
green peas and carrots
French fried potatoes
hearts of lettuce salad
apple pie a la mode
coffee

ORDINARY NONCONFORMISTS
…prefer meals like on menu below:

Kerouac’s coffee shop
snails
sweetbreads
Vichyssoise
beef Bourguignon
wild rice
pommes de terre soufflés
hearts of artichoke salad
Camembert cheese
caffè espresso

MAD NONCONFORMISTS
…prefer meals like on menu below:

NEUMAN’S WAY-OUT HOUSE
hummingbird tongues on toast
kippered guppy
puree of electric eel
flamingo under glass
creamed crab grass
sweet potato chips
hearts of cactus salad
licorice sherbert
moxie

You can see the original with the pictures here.

More About Decor

Fair Client: "I want the house to be nice and baronial, Queen Anne and Elizabethan, and all that; kind of quaint and Nuremburgy you know — regular Old English, with French windows opening to the lawn, and Venetian blinds, and sort of Swiss balconies, and a loggia. But I'm sure you know what I mean!" (George du Maurier, Punch, November 29, 1890)
The decor was extraordinary — suede walls, fluffy white carpets, smoked glass, salmon-pink tented ceilings. Jimmy Savile’s house, Mail Oct 2011

I know that the new owners will completely gut the house, extend it and add period touches that were probably never there in the first place. Steerforth, Age of Uncertainty blog on selling his mother’s house in Teddington

The “mansion” of bastard architecture and crude paint, with its brass indifferently clean, with coarse lace behind the plate glass of its golden-oak door, and the bell answered at eleven in the morning by a butler in an ill-fitting dress suit and wearing a mustache, might as well be placarded: “Here lives a vulgarian who has never had an opportunity to acquire cultivation.” Emily Post

Does your butler have a moustache? Shame on you!

Patio heaters have reached London N16 – but outdoor pizza ovens are still beyond the pale.

Someone reached this blog by typing “why do posh people never match their furniture?”. Why don’t they? They inherited it. ("The trouble with Michael is that he had to buy his own furniture" - Michael Jopling on Michael Heseltine)

Upwards always want to live in a converted rectory, not a manse or vicarage.

According to the Middle-Class Handbook, overhead lights are for emergency use only – like when someone drops a contact lens. Middle-class Upwards in the 19th century thought gas and electricity a bit vulgar (so unforgiving to the complexion). But why did the electricity/gas companies install central ceiling lights (traditional location for a chandelier) in the smallest cottage? Just as people lift details from the grounds of stately homes and put a bonsai version into their own half-acre (terraces, topiary, ponds, lawns), they lift details from the great houses themselves and stuff them into a much smaller interior: huge fireplaces, central chandeliers, dining tables, roll-top baths. And after Downton Abbey, everybody wants a butler’s pantry even though the society that produced them is long gone (for most of us).

Houses with exposed beams make Upwards shudder: in envy, because they could never afford a house that old; in horror, because beams have been devalued by imitations and also because they’re emblematic of an out-dated kind of cottaginess. It really is terribly hard being an Upward.

Upwards and grand Stow Crats whinge about collections of houses being called a “close” when it isn’t a cathedral close; they also complain about houses called Something Lodge that are neither a gate lodge nor a hunting lodge. Also American high-rises called the Something Arms like a pub, with no reference to any coat of arms.

They also hate anything bogus, like modern “antique” solar-powered “carriage lamps”, or wishing wells with no well. Or an inappropriate detail, like a Regency-style (Quality Street) bow shop window shoved into a Victorian terrace or 60s house. Caro Stow Crat doesn’t like bygones in the living room either – why display an ancient knife-cleaning machine (bought at a country house sale)? Hipster Rowena, now over her 50s phase, is either buying up 70s pottery owls and orange raffia lampshades or sets of pigeon holes from old offices and chemical-stained workbenches from redundant labs.

Suitability is the test of good taste always. Emily Post

More here. And here. And here.

You Are What You Eat Part Two

“My left-wing parents never gave me chocolate.” Gabriela von Bohlen, via Web

The very lovely Middle Class Handbook site complains about “customising” food, a ghastly habit we’ve picked up from across the pond. “Can I get a Four Seasons without one of the seasons?” Grand British people ate amazingly wonderful food but you weren’t supposed to comment on it. See E.M. Forster’s Room with a View: Lucy Honeychurch’s prospective mother-in-law talked of removing “that Honeychurch taint” because Lucy asked how the pudding was made.

Middle-class Weybridges pour scorn on anyone who dares to go vegetarian or be allergic to anything, or even have religious food preferences - it’s just putting people out and making work for them. More downmarket Teales are far too kind and polite to mind, and will try and accommodate food combining, veganism or the Atkins diet.

Some Weybridges are ashamed to be a “picky eater” – they force themselves to eat whatever’s put before them. ("I don’t want to make the hostess feel she has to supply an alternative.") Upper-class Stow Crats will tell you if they can’t eat anything (politely), but don’t go on about it. Samantha Upward messes unwelcome food about on her plate and hopes nobody will notice. Some Upwards force deliberately horrible foods onto guests to see how they cope (real-life examples: turnip soup, tomato icecream). A friend kept trying to make me eat mussels because I’d said I was allergic to them (still am). And there are those who hate anyone to state a preference because they think it may be an attempt to pull rank or manipulate.

Big Brother star Chantelle had never given a dinner party before Dine With Me and hadn’t a clue how to cook anything.

Research by Kantar Worldpanel shows that hummus consumption is dominated by social classes ABC1 and tails off in those aged over 44. ("There's a grand tradition of taking peasant food from around the Mediterranean and making it posh food here.”) bbc online October 11, 2011

Sam flinches at “Happy Meal” and Boots "meal deals". A “meal” is where you sit down at a laid table and work your way through soup, entrée and pudding. Anything else is a snack or a picnic. Or “eating between meals”, which you don’t do. (This may be a tad old-fashioned.) But she hates the word: she also flinches at combinations like “not at the meal table!” or “come over for a meal!”. She even flinches when wildlife presenters refer to animals “getting a meal”. Wouldn’t a rabbit be “dinner”?

When Upwards have nothing to do they can always whinge about the way food and drink is getting sweeter because that’s what common people like. It’s naff to “have a sweet tooth”. They used to pretend they liked melon with powdered ginger, and strawberries with black pepper – rather than sugar and cream. Yes, that caught on!

You Are What You Eat Part One here.