To think that going comprehensive is an exit from the middle class?

[VolvoMo]

There may be a few minor exceptions (due to wealth or ideology) but doesn't going comp take away your middle class badge and worse, give your kids the chance to carry a big chip on their shoulder for their adult life.

Oh and my dd passed the 11plus. We live in what's always been the catchment area for the grammar until this year when the catchment area shrunk by a mile due to a big birth year. As places are allocated on distance once you've passed dd will have to slum it in the comp.

Not really sure how a quirk of being born in a large birthrate year demotes us to working class but I shan't lose any sleep over it.

Can we also classify people by their buggy? where I live all the working class / single mums and people on benefits are somehow buying bugaboo bee and they don't look like 2nd hand...

I'm from a working class background and my old dear would rather cut out her tongue than utter a cuss word!

Middle class is nothing to do with money.

Complexo - how can you possibly tell whether their buggies are second hand?

I suppose people on benefits should be making their own prams out of suitcases and old bicycle wheels. Let's not allow them to get above their station.

Don't say that! I robbed a bank for my bugaboo bee and I finally thought I'd made it. Seems my foul mouth tats & the bottle of gin in my nappy bag will out me. Hot damn.

snappy, class and money are not the same thing at all. It's quite possible to be a wealthy working-class footballer/Alan Sugar/car salesman, or a middle-class family with a relatively low income.

Who keeps track who is in what class then? Is there a list somewhere?

I've worked it out! It's the middle class badge! They do exist.

No class at all at my rural Welsh comp. There simply wasn't a private school for miles around. I traveled 12 miles to secondary any way.

Yes, we had our internal pecking order, because my peer group all wanted to go to university. We looked down on the lower sets, but didn't worry about our own parentage at all.

LeQueen IME the very last thing the nouveau riche want to be described as is middle class.

Even now as a nouveau comfortable rather than riche I would not wish to have that label.

Buggies are no clue. They are something that gets the child from A to B and I only ever had second hand ones. I would say that I was middle class and all the talk about 'which buggy or pram' leaves me cold. The baby is one time that you can get away with everything second hand, they don't care. My first pram came from my neighbour's loft.

But how long does it take? If DH is taken as an example:

Maternal Grandad - long line of farm labourers and miners

Paternal Grandad - carpenter (more out of work than in)

Mum - teacher, then deputy head
Dad - Engineer

DH - lawyer after an Oxbridge and a comp.

The IL's, MIL now, truly believe they are/were working class. DH still believes he is working class but has lost the chip they so skillfully tried to weld to all their children.

The DC go to independent schools. DS, although connecting with Made in Chelsea, still thinks he's a bit more edgy than many of his peers

Nice to see you're up with me again "Exotic"

I would say middle class, but you can understand MIL still feeling working class.

Marriedinwhite

1. What does he call his mid day and evening meals?

1. What does he call the room where you relax in the evening

And

What does he say when he's introduced to someone?

Interesting example married would you say you were middle class?

seeker

1. He calls lunch lunch (MIL calls it dinner), he calls his evening meal dinner.

1. Depends which room it is . Usually the kitchen or the den - very occasionally, if everywhere else is too untidy, the drawing room.

1. Depends on the nature of the introduction: hand extends, says pleased to meet you or hello I think.

pickled fanjo no, I'm not middle class.

"Though, this will probably change...there'll probably be a brand new class constructed, very soon. Money Class as opposed to Middle Class perhaps"

Hardly brand new, LeQueen - the horror felt by 'old money' at having to associate with 'trade' goes back at least to Tudor times - Wolsey, despite being the richest and most influential man in England was derided for his 'common' origins.

Marriedinwwhite- he is q transition species- his children will have fully evolved to middle class- or PLGs, as my dp (also a transition species) refers to his own children....

I find it interesting that (ime) nobody ever defines themselves or their family as nouveau riche, even if the family clearly has moved from poor origins to greater wealth within a short space of time. Nouveau riche is always other people.

Ah but cory I fully accept that DH is nouveau and that most the money is his but I come from generatations of landed gentry and although there is very little left taxes and my mother's tendency to get married a lot I have nothing I'm not used to - except of course we keep the house warm. So as a couple we are a bit of a mix.

My dp's family are nouveau riche, know it and enjoy every second of it. (his father was a penniless Irish immigrant in th 50s who did the whole own bootstraps routine. Mine is posh but ancienne pauvre - generations of university educated, terribly worthy British Council types.

So married upper and working or working transition species?

The Duchess of Cambridge's very near ancestors were miners and labourers and no one pretends she is working class.