Middle class tribe - ever get on your nerves - light hearted rant 😄

[ginorwine]

I live in a middle class area which is dominated by lecturers , gp s , social workers etc -my Dh fits into that catagory and I am an x that catagory .
It's a really pretty area and the kids roam between houses etc
Recently - I seem to be a little irritated by its predictability and 'niceness '- tho am aware it's a good area I really am .
I'm
Grumpy menopausal creature at present !
The paint work is mainly Farrell and ball, same kitchen appliances , similar dress code .etc . Whilst I too have Farrell n ball in one room and may therefore fit into the cliche myself (!) I'm becoming quite amused by it all in a way but don't know why .Part of me loves it part of me wants to say rude words and act up and be a Harridan !
Why do we follow these 'tribal 'things ? .the estate agent once reffered to the area as all lentil s and lintels . 😃

No don't you listen to The Archers?? F&B has chalk in it and Dulux can look JUST like it on old fashioned walls mixed with chalk of course

Well that's what Eddie Grundy thinks

But Doob the middle class in many areas of London live in two million quid houses. It's a new sort of upper middle who've lucked out on the property prices.

Twenty years ago only millionaire aristos lives in million pound houses. On my sister's road in London (gentrified area but not posh by any means) a million quid gets you little more than a two up two down.

Noooo Eddie mixed it with flour!

I like Craig & Rose which is a bit posh but local. I love their colour range. I like nice cheese shops and bakeries. I think the white shop is bigger down south.
Thanks for explaining the logos. I thought it was some special code, like a masonic handshake but found it odd no-one else seemed to mention them.

I painted the last two houses I sold in London in colour matched Dulux. One for £1.695, the other for £4.2. Did the front doors in pale greeny Farrow and Ball though. I told one of the agents it was Dulux when he went on about it. He said he'd say he couldn't imagine the vendors used anything else if anyone asked. Bloody ridiculous - in this sort of property F&B is a miniscule percentage of the cost of renovation and purchase. but every penny counts I pay more attention to the fit of the front door, gutterings, roof and proportions when I buy tbh.

Admires stone fireplace, oak inglenook and looks up at 60s artexed drawing room ceiling winces. Tis very quirky though, like a huge cottage, circa 1925. It's interesting.

We didn't give a flying f* really - only had vair perfect houses when I'd renovated them to sell. We are more comfortable with a Weaslyish style a la the Burrow tbh. DH thought it was a good idea to have it all perfect but it was all a bit too sanitised and he didn't accept nicely that his books and papers and shite like his sephological (sp) election records had to go into storage

I love my drawing room now with it's tassled curtains (previous owners), big fireplace, mish mash of furniture. Winces at ceiling and their light fittings. there's a lot to do.

That was all a bit off message. Who cares? The richest person I know still has a pink vanity unit and Laura Ashley rosebud wallpaper in her bedroom. Last time I saw her she had ankle socks on with holes, trainer sandals, an India print skirt and fleece. She was also probably wearing £50k of diamonds. She has never given a flying f*. She's 87 now - her tribe rocks. She has told me and dh how well we have done for "ordinary people".

Am about to read a book entitled
Watching the English - the hidden rules of English behevoir !
I think I've mixed up trendy leftie with middle class ? 😄😄

Behevoir = Hyacinth
. Others will explain.

Mrs bucket ! ?

Mrs Bucket was never trendy leftie, neither did she have class. Charlie Bucket's mum did though!

The richest person I know still has a pink vanity unit and Laura Ashley rosebud wallpaper in her bedroom. Last time I saw her she had ankle socks on with holes, trainer sandals, an India print skirt and fleece. She was also probably wearing £50k of diamonds.

But how much money she has is no indication of her social class.

OP, Watching the English is pretty dated and although people rave about it on here as the ultimate contemporary book on social class, I think it gets quite a few things wrong. For instance, it doesn't really cover the sort of younger/affluent/brand-aware bit of the lower-middle class that most often gets name checked on here as the ultimate in MC-ness - Jules/Boden/Farrow and Ball/Smallbone and Devizes/ etc etc - probably because those kinds of marker change quite quickly, often when they're adopted by a social niche a bit lower than the usual adopters, who then deem whatever it was naff and move on to something else.

Farrow and Ball is a bit 'old hat' now everyone's painting their floors Calamine, darlings - not sure what's preferred now. Little, Green or one of those?

I think the fact the she doesn't and never has given a flying fuck is an indicator of her social class. Her mummy and daddy were so disappointed that she married into trade. Her DH's family, then her DH owned one of the UK's biggest brokers. Hope I haven't outed her.

I'm not sure I know who the richest person I know is . Haven't got a scooby tbh.

I grew up in a beautiful village, very down to earth and big community. My parents still live there and still consider it my home but I have to say... The new wave of yuppies in their mid 30s that have moved in over the past decade are just arrogant, self-righteous and one-uppers. It's embarrassing to hear them talk to each other.

Hello bibbity. Hopes you are well. The richest people are those with love in their hearts xxx

Aw I love that about love in their hearts. So very true.

Ah yes, the decorative woodburner, combined with stacked wood as some sort of art installation....here in real life we're chopping and stacking trees all summer to season enough fuel to heat us through the winter (one logburner, one Rayburn, two open fires), we're surrounded by piles of it, it's like a bloody lumber yard out there can't afford to run the oil central heating Most of my neighbours in our tribal rural area are doing the same, solid fuel heating is a ball-ache.

Do these naive MC enclaves have special little woodshops, selling artisan split logs?

A lintel is an RSJ by any other name ?

Friend painted her new kitchen in F and B .She said it went on like cream and was much easier to use than Dulux etc (we live in nice middle class suburb but no Elephants Breath front doors that I've noticed )

m.youtube.com/watch?v=yuTMWgOduFM
You wanna live like common people :)

We're like lljk. Stand out. Really a bit like john Bailey/ iris murdoch's house by the end.

I don't give a shit. Which is obvious. Even DS has now spotted that everyone else's houses are decorated alike.

I am WC, have lived in very WC areas and mixed areas and now am in a very MC area.

I live in an ex-MOD house which doesn't help with the sameyness, but generally I prefer living in areas which have a real mix of social classes and nationalities and styles of housing/clothing/religion/social interests. Yeah, it's not nice to live in a really rough area and feel worn down by it even if you're not in danger. But it's also not nice to feel worn down by a community you don't fit in with even if it is a 'naice' community. I think there are plenty of MC people in unpretentious areas, it's silly to pretend the self-awarely class-signalling pretentious MC enclaves don't exist.

I really liked Grayson Perry's BBC 2 (?) series on class.

On a more serious note, classism is quite complicated in the UK because class is complicated here, but I think gently teasing the painfully class-anxious MC because they all seem to have the same hair/clothes/paint colours and are constantly rushing to keep up with the Joneses is different to making fun of working-class people clinging to their tribe after being ground down by successive governments who give not a single shit about them, and Th**er in particular of course but it's not really let up since. Obviously isolation can happen in all communities and it's not me saying that WC people never want to leave or change - I'm from industrial West Mids and a v WC part of it, and I couldn't fucking wait to leave as a frustrated, sensitive, arty teenager. But classism isn't a straight line flowing equally both ways here, it meanders.

Bet there's lots of 'upcycled' items around.

God, that word makes me stabby.

Tribes are always suffocating when they get too homogenous and concentrated. It applies to all classes, industries and various other parameters. I like some diversity.

I think the writers of Midsomer Murders probably felt the same as the OP