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Original poster

who decides what/whois middle class?

91 replies

drlove8alltheeastereggs · 12/04/2009 18:30

ive always wondered what thats all about! what makes someone middle class?, what exactly is middle class?does it have a wage bracket? say £ 50 000 - 250 000 ? or is it just a load of bollox to make the have a wee bit but used to e skint people feel better about themselves.

OP posts:
Portoeufino · 12/04/2009 20:25

I thought it was Nancy Mitford and her U/un U stuff.....

Marne · 12/04/2009 20:26

I am working class

We don't earn very much.
We don't own our own home (we rent)
I don't really buy jewelery
I can't spell
I went to a state school.

But i like to dress middle class

KingRolo · 12/04/2009 20:33

Middle class.
Simple.

Portoeufino · 12/04/2009 20:36

LOL . Yachting holidays help!

Original poster
drlove8alltheeastereggs · 12/04/2009 20:38

lol@ boden ! wondered how long it would take for boden to crop up? .... now in true MN tradition what about the bumsex? do middle class people do it? or is it just the aristos?

OP posts:
KingRolo · 12/04/2009 20:47

Think it's just the aristos who do the bumsex drlove. MC too worried about hygiene.

schneebly · 12/04/2009 20:53

What happens if you grew up in a very working class environment but your life/work etc now is more of the lower-middle class ilk?

I had a laugh with DH the other day because my friend was having a birthday celebration whereby we would be staying in a caravan in a holiday park and the DSs were hugely excited by this prospect. When I was a child this would have been the norm and I would have been extited by hotels!

Portoeufino · 12/04/2009 21:01

LOL . We went for 2 weeks near St Tropez a couple of years ago. DH was SOOO disapointed with our Pierre et Vacances accommodation, I swear he told his colleagues we were going to stay with Elton John for two weeks.

Nontoxic · 12/04/2009 21:05

Someone mentioned yachting holidays; we've been on a couple of flotillas but no one else really speaks to us, I think because they're not quite sure of our mc credentials.

Or maybe they just don't like the look of us.

Portoeufino · 12/04/2009 21:06

Did you have Boden though? I've thought about doing one of those holidays and wonder if we would FIT in?

Nontoxic · 12/04/2009 21:09

Ha! No I don't have Boden - very prevalent the first time a few years ago, but not so much last year.

Portoeufino · 12/04/2009 21:17

Oh dear. I can do posh, but dh is definitely rough round the edges and has been known to pick fights when he's had a few (thinking Cuba NYE 2003 and he was going to propose, but a woman from B'ham nicked our romantic table). Carnage I tell you!

Nontoxic · 12/04/2009 21:22

Think a flotti'd be a lot more fun with you two around!

Portoeufino · 12/04/2009 21:33

It's a date then, the next time we go yachting? Even discussing yachting must surely be MC?

My childhood holidays were Lloret de Mar, Torbay in a chalet, and Ostend. Ostend really is crap. I live in Belgium now. Iwould not go there.

Nontoxic · 12/04/2009 21:56

I went on precisely three childhood hols - Butlins aged 11 and 13, and Derry in a huge family gang aged 16.

We're probably hiring a yacht on the Norfolk Broads this summer if you'd care to join us.

LadyOfScoffleTheEasterEggs · 12/04/2009 22:00

Yachts? Flotillas? I have been on a pedalo!

Portoeufino · 12/04/2009 22:11

Well my best ever holiday was 7 of us on a boat in the Camargue. Not a yacht i hasten to add. And there was a 10 litre box of Cotes de Rhone. How they got that boat back in one piece is a miracle. We still laugh about the plastic table being blown out to sea....

Nontoxic · 12/04/2009 22:25

Yes all the yachtie talk does sound flash - but DH lied on a school trip aged 12 so he could get in a boat, and then his dad got him a dinghy on their next caravan holiday and they taught themselves.

Think they were lower middle as PIL was a policeman (and they had their own caravan), so I married above myself!

I grew up surrounded by condemned houses and two year olds brandishing burning sticks by wasteland fires (or was it a rolled up newspaper?)

hobbgoblin · 12/04/2009 22:40

Doesn't stuff like recreational pursuits come into it somewhere too?

I remember someone mentioning that - she was a skilled manual worker, parents upper management type, averagely wealthy, lived in India for half their lives...

She would have been middle of middle but because she palyed tennis and kept horses and some other points such as speaking RP, or v. close to it she went up a class.

It is all very much more difficult to define these days I think and all is left is the kind of instinctive judgements we all make.

You could say some classes are too ignorant to make a judgement and others too keen to, and by that very token both groups are more similar than they'd care to admit.

Think Nouveau Riche...

Oh, and all that Red Brick Uni crap...

Is all crap actually but useful for marketing and not landing yourself a friend that will unwittingly utter the word cunt over coffee in Carluccio's.

Nontoxic · 12/04/2009 23:09

Or (shudder) TOILET.

allthetwinklystars · 12/04/2009 23:10

Someone once came up to me at school, all proud for having worked out how to identify the middle classes. His key question was 'Did your father go to university?'. My answer was no and his theory collapsed.

I'm a product of parents from very different classes, leaves me somewhere in the middle. It was interesting to meet my future PIL and find out what middle class really meant... I'd say it's definitely a state of mind, coupled with a certain kind of financial atability - enough to be comfortable but always dreaming of that little bit more. As in an imagained lifestyle.

allthetwinklystars · 12/04/2009 23:11

stability not atability, obviously.

sleeplessinstretford · 12/04/2009 23:32

my parents both went to university-my grandparents were a cleaner,a seamstress,someone who worked for the gpo and a navvy-my parents live in an massive house in a really posh area-all their neighbours are millionaires-my mum drives a renault clio and my dad a laguna...i am a sahm who was a single mum for erm twelve years and had a big swanky job til i got made redundant when having my baby the other year-we're utterly fucking skint but i own my house,my eldest daughter is at a posh school on a scholarship thing and i am not sure what i am
(i had a pony and went to a private school for a few years before deciding to try holding an open debate about homosexuals-with a nun-they decided we weren't the right mix for eachother the school and i...)
so what am i? i've no degree and lived in a council flat with my baby for 5 years before buying my house by the way...

glasjam · 12/04/2009 23:37

I know the rest of my family probably think I'm middle class now because I went on to university (OK it was a polytechnic when I was there but it's a university now OK?), because I nearly always eat my meals at the table and because I read those extra large newspapers.

I still baulk somewhat at the word "supper" and sometimes (though VERY rarely) when I am on my own and the kids can't see me, I eat my dinner on my lap .

Surely I can NEVER be middle class if I do this??

Nontoxic · 13/04/2009 09:45

I let my kids watch too much telly, although we always eat en famille at the table.

When I was 13, I distinctly remember a discussion with our form teacher about class.

She asked us all what our fathers did, and because mine had a trade, labelled me middle class, to much sneering from the rest of the bitches who already called me a 'snob.'

My dad was a shipfitter on the docks ffs! And a shop steward and Labour party stalwart - he'd have given her a right tongue-lashing if he'd known.

She'd obviously confused a trade with a profession - but she was a PE teacher I suppose.

If anyone of them had visited our house they never would have called me middle class.