How I became a Middle-Class Bastard

Actually, it’s more than that. I’m a Middle-AGED, Middle-class bastard now, which is twice as worse and means that I am poisonously laced with all the invidious attitudes that go with both stereotypes. For starters, I just used the word invidious. Only a paradigm of turpitude would employ such terminology. And I am that paradigm, which more or less means (before you feel the need to check the dictionary app on your phone like I just did) that I am a prime example of nasty self-righteous prejudice, housed in a liberal-socialist humanitarian-sequined overcoat of slightly narked politeness; or to be more precise - actually technically and basically my friends - a right bleeding middle-class bastard.

I wasn’t always this way.

I used to be young. And before that I used to be working class.

Before the amateur sociologists begin unpicking my blasé bandying about of class labels and accuse me of employing such unsuitably vague and over-generalised misnomers, let me just say one thing. I am deliberately stereotyping. Like pissing your pants in a supermarket queue, stereotyping is anti-social, offensive and just plain wrong, but from a non-protagonist’s viewpoint, it is highly amusing.

What turned me into this Middle-class bastard then? And what damage has it caused?

I believe that everything hinged on going to university, where I was rewarded for my half-efforts with a degree in Classical Studies. Here I surrounded myself with similar working-class people and poked fun at all the jumper-wearing, Sloane-accented veterans of multiple ski-holidays. But it was like walking into the sea and trying to shake yourself dry as you went along. I had begun to turn to the dark side and yet I would forever try to exert my working-class sensibilities by attacking those who were now my peers.

For example, the gentrification of football has meant that my £1000 a year season ticket provides me with a seat surrounded by some right middle-class tossers. In other words, they are more middle-class than I am and for that reason I despise them. I despise how they live down to their stereotypes, by pontificating in well-spoken accents about the game at loud volume, breaking off to discuss matters of economics, law and finance, being polite to each other and yet thoughtlessly ill mannered to everyone else around them. They all leave early and Stuart rings a taxi to take him home to Notting Hill, so that he doesn’t have to queue for the tube. Wanker.

Another example of raging against the middle-class machine from the inside was to do with that degree. I went on to do teacher training and there were 15 of us doing a PGCE in Classics. 13 had studied Ancient Greek or Latin at university and these “linguistic” Classicists were destined for jobs available only in the private sector or some grammar schools. 3 of us were non-linguistic Classicists, because we’d only taken one of those two ancient languages as a minor part of a degree that was more about the history and culture of Greece and Rome. It meant we could go on and teach History or English in state education and therefore we were able to revel in our non-elitism.

This didn’t help. I met my wife at university. She comes from Surrey and her family eat lots of vegetables. Not normal vegetables that you’d get from a tin, peas and carrots and the such like, but exotic vegetables like aubergines and courgettes and other stuff that looks like it comes out the ground rather than a shop. But now I eat all that shit and harbour a snobbish disregard for tinned veg, tinned fruit, microwave meals and wine costing less than £4. These are the measures of my middle-classness. Especially with regard to wine. I could have started this blog with a thesis about what exactly I mean by middle-class, but that would have been a middle-class thing to do; so to save trouble, let’s just assume that middle-class means that the ratio of wine to beer that you’d drink as a man is heavily weighted towards the former. I reckon I’m about 3:1, thus am I condemned.

So, what are the other factors in making me this way?

I live in St Albans. When I get into debt I remortgage, because my house is disgustingly overpriced on account of being near an excellent school to which I send my kids. It is of course a comprehensive school – I am against any other kind, in principle – but the intake of students is only comprehensive insofar as you have to be able to afford one of the semi-detached properties in the surrounding streets to be able to get in.

When it’s raining hard or excessively windy I worry about damage to the roof extension, rather than how shit it would be to have to get a bus to work.

When something goes wrong with my car, I stress about the cost and inconvenience of getting it fixed, because then we’d be down to just my wife’s car. Again, no bus worries.

Had I booked tickets for a holiday in Egypt this year, I’d have been cursing the locals for not being able to tolerate another year of tyrannical freedom-curbing government, because I might have lost my deposit to Thomson.

And I have just started playing squash. With a bloke called Tim.

That, my friends, is how I have turned to the Dark Side. I will leave you with one final example that best encapsulates the Russian Doll sense of being a middle-class bastard with a working-class one raging inside. My wife picked me up in her car from somewhere or other, because I had been drinking. Some dickhead driving behind us was too close, something I consider to be the height of macho intimidation and bad fucking manners. So, as we pulled away into another lane, he passed on our inside and I opened my window to spit a big grolly of phlegm at him. Sadly, it never have hit him in the face as his window was closed and he was going too fast, but if it had done then I am sure he would’ve noticed that my spit tasted of white wine. Probably Pinot Grigio and definitely from a £6 bottle.