Am I A Middle-Class Wanker?

I wrote some thoughts in my notebook coming home on the 63 bus on Sunday:

Caitlin Moran’s column in the Times Magazine this weekend was about why, despite having her own conservatory and piano and recycled wine glasses, she still feels working rather than middle class. And how it’s not about how her life looks, but her frame of mind. What a silly thing to write for the Times! It’s only going to be read by other middle-class people at their kitchen tables over their morning filter coffee. None of her readership will identify with her at all!

As I read the column, eating grapefruit in my friend’s kitchen with all matching appliances (including an impressive 4-piece toaster with bagel button), I completely agreed with her. She admits that ‘the way we calibrate class in this country does indeed insist that if I were now … to claim that I am still working class, I would be, in some obscure way, a bit of a w***er’. And that is true. The logical explanation for this is that in identifying yourself as working class you are claiming you have less than you do, and to do so implies you do not appreciate what you have. I often worry about the level of hypocrisy I excude when I talk to my friends at university about the importance of unemployment benefits and child support and EMA while shopping for new dresses at the Bullring Topshop. But that doesn't stop me feeling working class, like my upbringing still matters. Class has not been defined purely in monetary terms by just about anyone for like, ages. The real reason you’re seen as a bit of a knob for distinguishing yourself as a class that belies your earnings, is that you’re seen as a try-hard. You’re like a tory MP rallying for votes in Sheffield by maintaining you’re best mates with Jarvis Cocker. But Jarvis Cocker has just as much money as a tory MP. Does that mean they are now of a similar social class? Does the fact that a bunch of people really really liked Pulp and paid money for their albums make Jarvis a wanker for continuing to sing about common people?  

Of course not. As humans we make stereotypes because we like to define things. We like rigid rules to dictate these definitions, so that we can recognise people and put them into categories easily. We want to know as much as we can about stuff; our brain naturally wants to fill in the gaps. So we like to be able to see a copy of The Art Book, or a Nigella recipe out in someone’s home and immediately be able to deduce from that that they also probably liked The White Album and have recently taken up knitting. All these traits are of course as unconnected to class as they are to each other. There seems to have been something of an obsession recently with defining ‘middle-class’. Recycling is middle-class, irony is middle-class, guilt is middle-class, swearing for effect is middle-class. Mocking the middle-class is middle class. According to the blog ‘Stuff White Brits Like’, ambivalence about Will Self is middle-class. Seriously? Ambivalence about Will Self is the default emotion everyone has about Will Self. Those overly long and complicated words he uses in his consciously deep and philosophical writing. He epitomises the ‘fit but you know it’ dilemma. Will Self himself is probably ambivalent about Will Self (the self-aware middle-class twat). It doesn’t matter how you were brought up and what you believe in. As soon as you start a compost heap or use the c-word you are no longer allotted the right to quote Arthur Scargill or drink tennants. It’s a package deal. You have to move out of your flat, take your compost and dirty words down to Surrey, buy a cat which you will have to name after an obscure 80s music icon and start a record collection. Because OBVIOUSLY there can’t be any overlap. Working and middle-class people can’t engage in the same activities. They are two distinct spheres. How on earth can people in completely separate worlds both follow Stephen Fry on twitter? It’s confusing an immovable divide!

Come on guys, it’s not about what you buy, or what music you listen to. I may buy organic when I can, and find Thom Yorke's voice enchanting and beautiful. But this is Britain, class is POLITICAL. Financially, my social class confuses me. Politically, it does not. Despite not having very much money when I was a child, I can’t deny the reasonable cushtie-ness of my life. Being met with the fierce scent from the brewery across the road every time we opened the door or window of our first Edinburgh flat made me feel poor (especially that time when upstairs had a shower and our kitchen ceiling fell in). Reading Irvine Welsh a few years later made me feel very, very well off. Mark Renton would shun me as a peroni-drinking university dickhead. I mean, my mum’s not a miner. She’s a camera operator. We have an imac. I’ve spent whole hours of my life convincing her of our new, undeniable middle-class status, pointing to the aforementioned snazzy computer, and her own black and white photography framed on the walls of our open plan living room. PRIVILEGE, DUH. But my reflex has always been to regard middle-class as something I’m surrounded by, rather than part of. I will still feel far more easily united under the phrase ‘tory scum’ than ‘squeezed middle’. As Ms Moran says, the good old days were only good for the man. Being working class is about change: ‘joy, revolution, progress, urbanity, carousing until you bust’. The only way is up. Restlessness; a need for change. Walking down Millbank on the first student fees march in 2010,the beautiful flames outside office buildings warming my belly and satiating my need for some kind of revolution (however small), I received a text from my grandma saying ‘I’m in Trafalgar Sq, where are you?’. That made me feel brilliant. She didn’t receive the call-to-arms passed round every student halls in the country, but still she wrapped herself up and left her Hertfordshire home to defend what she believed in. She remembered the importance of higher education not only in providing young people with degrees, but also an opportunity to GET OUT. Whether you’re looking from a balcony at the top of a tower block, or through your bay window onto a tree lined street, the world can still look old and crap, and in need of a reshuffle.

If our current earnings negate our past ones, then there’s no reason to hope to vote anyone into Parliament who will actually represent the working classes. If we connect salary with one’s ability to identify with certain classes, then as soon as anyone gets elected and settles into their accommodation near Westminster, we effectively retract their ability to communicate with the common man. I’m not saying social typecasting is the only thing stopping politicians being fair and open-minded. I’m not so naïve as to assume that our poor representatives really have a degree of ‘normality’ to prove, and we’re being unfair in branding them ridiculous for queuing up in northern pasty shops attempting to dupe us into thinking they’re just like Roger from Greggs except if he had power. I know they’re not stuck feeling hopelessly trapped in their lonely upper-class money bubbles, jumping up and down in a furious attempt to smash through the glass ceiling, trying desperately to free themselves from the GOSH DARN pheasant dinners and free police horse trials. But champagne socialism is rare. And people do play-up to their stereotypes. So putting so much emphasis on rigidly defined class, and labeling people as wankers for trying to contradict their background probably doesn’t help.  

OH. And why was I reading the Times Magazine on a Sunday morning, you ask? They don’t sell that it New York, do they? And you won’t have bought your way round the pay wall will you Siobhan, you blatant Guardian reader. Well no, that’s true. I was reading the weekend paper left on my friend’s kitchen table. In south London. I left my internship at BAB, and I left New York, and I flew back to England. They don’t really have class war there. Or healthcare. And the lights are really, really too bright. I had no kinfolk, and the utterly superfluous business of international bigwig schmoozery was getting me down big time. So I only lasted 3 months as a grown-up. I’m going to take a break and try again. Anyway, more explanation coming soon, but for now, it’s great to be back in the shire. Just great.  

Coping Test

Thursday night was BritishAmerican Business’ Transatlantic Business Awards Dinner. An annual event at the Pierre Hotel in New York’s Upper East Side, where tables go for over 25, even 50,000 dollars; high powered businessmen drink wine and scotch, eat well, and watch four honourees accept awards for their contribution to international business relations. The whole thing is fucking swish: black tie, precision planning and the utmost professional conduct throughout. How exciting! It’s the biggest event in the BritishAmerican Business events calendar. Forewarned by my colleagues that - having never been to a black tie event of this calibre before - I would be enthralled by the precision and class of the night, I decided to use the evening as a benchmark. Perhaps being surrounded by bravado and success would finally spark my latent passion for business.

Metaphorical litmus paper having been dipped in the acid of a world class business awards dinner, I can now officially declare the evening thoroughly vom-tastic. The whole thing made me literally sick. From leaving the office at 4pm to leaving the Pierre at around 11pm, I had a slightly pukey sensation at the back of my throat. While I sat infront of my $5000 dinner, listening to some of the most powerful men in the business and financial sector making blasé comments about the state of the euro-zone, having a casual chuckle at the expense of starving Greeks, my gag reflex threatened to completely give in. In fact I would have loved nothing more than to have personally thrown up on the expensive tux of every attendee.

Getting driven from the office was very strange. Speeding down 5^th avenue in a black town car with leather seats, the driver apologizing for the state of the traffic, felt surreal.  In the end I had to close the scenario for the night (which I had had open on my knee, memorising the names and faces of the guests of honour), and get out my notebook instead. The only words I had time to scribble down before we turned on to 61^st were ‘So I quit. I don’t feel snazzy’.

My sense of unease increased when I stopped at the Pierre, and had the door opened for me by the hotel doorman, and shut behind me by my driver. Intentionally swinging my crinkled h&m plastic bag by my side for all to see, and feeling slightly rebellious, I walked inside.

I wasn’t hit by an aura of money and class when I walked in. My first reaction to the building was how antiquated it seemed. Attempts had been made to bring the tiled entrance hall and old chandeliers up to date with some abstract art on the walls, and a large wooden carving in the lobby, which I’m fairly sure was of Vishnu. I’d apologise for my potential inaccuracy, but I doubt it was positioned there with worship in mind, and I’m sure the person who bought it didn’t have much preference as to which oriental god greeted their guests, so I feel unlikely to have offended them by not being 100% sure. Given its setting, rather than looking trendy or up to date it looked, frankly, colonial.

Preparation for the night began after a quick ‘touch up’ in the ‘powder room’. I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone use that phrase without a hint of sarcasm before in my life. Everyone else seemed to know what they were doing. I slapped on some mascara, more to fit in than out of actual want, and then had nothing else to do really, so sat in the corner and watched everyone else put their faces on. Had a sandwich too. Ham. It was good. The time then came to set up the registration desks, and circle round the ballroom to make sure all the programmes were laid straight on the chairs and to straighten up after the catering staff, as apparently they can sometimes be ‘slapdash’. I got chatting to an old Spanish waiter during the sound check (‘It’s like being in the movies, no? I don’t feel like I’m at work, I feel like I’m in the theatre!’) Positive as the old guy was, rather than make me feel happy and jovial about my surroundings he just reminded me that he was being paid to be there. That sounds very very very ungrateful. And it probably is. I tried to stifle these thoughts, but being completely truthful, that was my gut reaction. His use of the word ‘movies’ and ‘theatre’ in a comical foreign accent, while wearing a white, Manuel-style waiters jacket again made the high-ceilinged ballroom, complete with columns and red curtains, feel intensely old fashioned. I wondered how long he had worked there. And whether his father or his grandfather had come to the States, from Puerto Rico, or Mexico, or Dominica. References to the euro-zone and the economic crisis aside, the whole night could just as easily have happened 60 or 90 years ago. Despite not feeling that the awards were much to be proud of, I was still irked that no women were being honoured at all.

In fact, greeting guests, I noticed very few women entered the reception at all without a male chaperone. I noticed a lot of things which I found very strange actually, for example, about half an hour after registration opened, a woman asked me if I knew of a discreet place she could change her shoes. I was flummoxed. There was a chair right behind her. She had tights on. How much discretion was needed? In fairness, she didn’t realise she was asking someone with what I must assume are lower standards than most for such proceedings. Leaving Reading Festival early one year with two split wellies, I found it necessary to sit down in the edge of the concourse at St Pancras International, get out my shoes, dry socks and baby wipes from my rucksack, and clean and dry my muddy feet before getting on the train home. I still maintain such action was preferable to squelching the length of the world’s longest champagne bar. I directed her to the restroom with the look of a confused child who’s just been asked the square root of pi.

I probably found the whole evening more absurd than it actually was, because I was thinking so hard about how to fit in, analysing and trying to identify accepted behavior with almost autistic precision. I wasn’t sure the British Ambassador, or the chairman of Standard Chartered would appreciate being welcomed to their awards dinner by a smirky girl who drops her t’s, so I tried my very best to be a refined and well-spoken New Yorker. I’m not certain how well this went. I will admit that I’m not the most comfortable of people in any sophisticated situation. I’m the one who feels uncomfortable being waited on in Pizza Hut. (‘No no, don’t worry about rectifying my order, that’s an extra walk for you … Well no I can’t drink the apple juice, but I’ll just drink from the water jug … well if you’re absolutely sure…’). No matter where I am in it, I never deal well with hierarchy. Which is why I warmed instantly to the guest in the red bow-tie who chatted openly to me and high-fived his wife when she pronounced my name right. It’s a pity he’s probably one of the men responsible in the current breakdown of the western economy. 

I’m conscious of appearing (as JP puts it in the new series of Fresh Meat) as a ‘money racist’. I mean, I was brought up knowing Margaret Thatcher to be an evil woman before I even knew who she was, and I do find it hard to put down an Irvine Welsh novel... As a Brit, I’m preoccupied with class, right? But class and money are not inextricably linked. I don’t begrudge these men their hard-earned millions. I begrudge the extra tens and hundreds of millions they made after that, by exploiting their political leverage and crippling the banking system. I begrudge their continued flippancy towards the downturn they’ve created, and their steadfast claims that it takes ‘courage’ (rather than a blind sense of entitlement) to uphold the values they extol in this current climate. When I booked my plane tickets home for Christmas, I was faced with a big banner from Virgin Atlantic: ‘Did you know you’ve just paid the highest air-tax in the world, to the British government? Make a difference, sign our petition today.’ This was news to me, and the knowledge didn’t make me feel robbed. It gave me a warm feeling of patriotism. Don’t give in to the bigwigs, Dave. If I can afford it, they can.