Germphobia is a class thing, isn't it?

[tenbob]

Full disclosure: I'm slightly fascinated by the posters here who won't wash their hands on a towel at someone else's house, buy cakes at a school fair or use a public toilet for fear of germs, and admit to being the sort of person who eats stuff past the sell-by date if it passes the sniff test

But I've just spent a couple of days working at a food fair type thing and noticed a definite class divide in germ tolerance

There was no end of stereotypical posh families who would share their ice cream with the Labrador, eat food that had fallen on the floor etc

And the mums (it was always the mums) who were obsessively wet wiping everything were non-posh

Can you prove or debunk my theory?
And if I'm right, why are the upper classes so relaxed about dirt?

Yeah maybe there's something about poor people feeling more judged so clean to make up for not having the right caliber of house? But am an anomaly as wc and not house proud.

Years ago one friend told me that she had heard a mutual acquaintance telling another mutual acquaintance that my house was a bit messy. I think friend expected me to be in floods of tears and then sort my house out. I didn't. I just looked at her and said 'yeah, it is a bit isn't it.

The Spanish often remark with wonderment on the British custom of carpeting bathrooms.
On the other hand, my experience of the Spanish is that they tolerate much more grease left on stoves and kitchen walls than an anglo would.

Oh god surely no one has fittted a carpet in a bathroom for the last 30 years? What Ian wrong with them?

What is wrong with them

Poor Ian

I’m not sure proper OCD is really class sensitive tbh.

My rented house is all carpet upstairs apart from bathroom and I hate it. I wish I could take it all out.

We have always had dogs and horses, and at some point although things are tidy, you have to accept they will never been clean all the time. You’d be obsessively hoovering on the hour every hour otherwise because of the hairs. And when you spend your time at the yard and get filthy, I guess home seems a lot cleaner by comparison regardless of the state 😂😂 agree with a PP that at the private school I went to there was a second hand shop and all of the poshest people used it because they had nothing to prove

My house is all carpet upstairs (apart from
Bathroom) I don’t love it but I prefer it to the Noise of walking uncarpeted

When I read AIBU threads where posters compete to be the most fastidious and germ conscious, I think of something that's happened a few times in Spain: I've gone into a public toilet and found it full of people thronged around a dirty toilet, shrieking and pantomiming horror, repeating "Qué asco!" ("yuck", or "how revolting") at higher and higher volume.
I saw "people" rather than "women" because there was even a man among them once, though he wasn't shrieking, and I got the impression he had been dragged into the women's toilets to see his female relatives' display of horror.

That’s true. We’re shoes off though (the people that live here, not visitors) so socks and slippers don’t tend to make much noise.

We had a horse in our kitchen once, does that help?

No-one's talking about OCD (which is not just about germs or cleaning).

The last Earl who actually lived at our local stately home had trouble getting any of his pheasants that he had saved for his own families consumption plucked and dressed because he liked them hung for so long they were maggoty and their heads fell off. Pretty disgusting and very upper class. I find obsession with cleanliness rather irritating, we like our bed left 3 weeks between washes, seldom wash our hands after gardening or dealing with pets and generally have better things to do than wash window sills. (middle class)

I also think it may also be something that changes over generations. My granny was pretty lax over domestic stuff, my mother almost OCD on scrubbing boiling and polishing everything. I've gone back the other way.

an interesting point, my germaphobic constantly antibacterial using friend who fusses around her children and their hygiene has the children who are ill most often 🙄

AwkwardHeliotrope

I don’t know why but one of my life goals is to have a horse in my kitchen, if only for a minute. The image of it just tickles me so much 😂🙈

It’s quite interesting to hear people clamouring to prove how VERY FILTHY they are on this thread. It’s so strange to live in a country where being upper class is so desirable people are even eager to claim to be filthy vagabonds to get in on the action. It’s quite sad really .

I taught at a school in a deprived area and I am sorry to say that the pendulum does swing around again at the very bottom of the social ladder.

Some individual children (from families suffering multiple disadvantages) looked positively grey from infrequent or no bathing - they smelt, their clothes often had a greyish, 'stiff' quality and bad teeth were not at all uncommon. :( I referred several of these children to the HT for extra involvement but not much was done. Sometimes the school welfare officer would give them new sets of uniform from lost property. This was at 5 - 6 years old.

It is not all filthy lords happily driving around in their landrover vs chipper working-class mums anti-bac wiping their house to the limit as MN would have you believe.

Ikeepaforkinmypurse my DM (Italian living in the UK) is convinced the reason 'English children are always ill' her words! is because of carpets.

She is having Italian houseguests at the end of the month and is frantically spring cleaning

Germaphobia is not a class thing.
Boasting about how gloriously grubby you are tends to be a middle class pastime. It springs from the belief that the upper classes are not concerned with cleanliness, its beneath them, so the middle classes are telling us they they too are above cleaning.

Working class people can be filthy too. Ask anyone who works in the community about the houses they visit. Filth is not class specific, nor is cleanliness.

But as people have pointed out, its easier to be open about your poor hygiene if you are not vulnerable and you have the confidence affluence brings.

When my eldest two were little they went to a primary school that was within site of another primary. Their school was overlooked by the mc families in favour of the other.
The kids in my DC's school were mostly clean and tidy and brushed and groomed within an inch of their lives. Braided hair, short hair cuts for boys, ironed, brand new uniforms and proper shoes. Mums were conservatively dressed but in the latest Next stuff.

The pupils of the MC school were mostly untidy, wearing faded leggings with dresses, holey tights, mis-matched clothes and their hair hadn't seen a brush for a while. Parents wore casual clothes and a 'don't care' attitude.

The difference was striking.

I don't think there was much difference when it came to motivation. Those mc families were no more 'don't care' than the wc ones. They would have rather died than turn up at the school gates in neat and tidy Next clothes with a child who looked as if someone bothered about their appearance. That would have marked them out from the crowd. They wouldn't fit in.

Same as the wc lot. They didn't want anyone talking about them in the playground for having kids that looked like 'tramps'.

Plus they didn't want anyone thinking they were too poor to look after their kids properly and they didn't want anyone calling the social on them. They specially didn't want their own mums and aunties to give them a bollocking for looking soapy.

Excellent post MrsDV

Thank you Sprinkles

My dc currently go to a v expensive school (work pays) and like a pp it has absolutely rammed second hand uniform sale. The much poorer state school our dc used to attend had no such thing. I think there is a lack of caring about what others think.

Idk, I'm working/middle (emergent) and I'm gross

My sons went to a private school until they were 11. Second hand blazers were hugely in demand. The last one I bought DS2 had 6 name labels in it sewn one over the other, the first four I'd never heard of. I kept all of the labels in an envelope to remind me of those days. DS2 had the longest name tape in history so I couldn't carry on the tradition. The blazer was sold again in the school shop though.

Why do people keep talking about school uniform? Do you buy them dirty and stained? Holey?