Educating the Bastard N.A.M.M.S (New Age Middle-Class Males)

While that paradigm of turpitude and self-aggrandising man of destiny Mr Gove slices at the education system with his relentless rapier of regression, someone really needs to have a word in his misshapen Pob-esque shell-like about the urgent need to introduce some form of specialised education for those of us who climb the social mobility escalator from council house to over-valued ex-council house in moderately affluent middle-class pockets of leafiness.

In other words, where are the fucking life skills for us New Age Middle Class Males?

Mr Gove, I hearby present to you my blue-print for such a qualification.  A new O’Level, if you will.

Unit One: Identifying Different Forms of Vegetable.

Up until the age of 20, when I met my Surrey-born Mrs, I could name 3 types of vegetable.  Carrots, Peas and Sweetcorn.  I had a suspicion that potato might be a fourth and never could remember about tomatoes or cucumbers being animals, minerals or fruits. But once I was cast into a middle-class jungle of exotic vegetables, a mind-expanding journey of un-tinned, soil-encrusted foodstuffs ensued.  What the holy fuck was a courgette?  This deformed cucumber was just the first muddied object to introduce itself to my dinner plate, followed by parsnips, aubergines and various coloured peppers.  It was with trepidation that I nibbled at these oddities, after all, I had grown up picking the onions out of beef burgers (ah, onions, that was a 4^th vegetable I’d heard about.)  Clearly, your average working-class lad must be made to learn the names of 364 vegetables by rote.

Unit Two: Dish-washer stacking

We don’t want our NAMMs to lack manual skills and so, with an eye to the fact that he will spend each day of the rest of his life loading a dishwasher, he must be trained to analyse space and items of used kitchenware; to think logically about maximising the former in order to provide a comprehensive cleansing of the latter.  Male pride is a fierce furnace that can warm the heart or explode in anger, and the successful and efficient loading of a dishwasher, in which no cubic centimetre is wasted, is what separates the middle-class men from the boys.

Unit Three: DIY

Your average 4-bedroom semi with all mod-cons and extensive garden is a minefield of “shit that can go wrong”.  A leaking tap, a flat tyre, an unreliable electricity supply to the garage, a cranking sound from the washing machine while on spin… these sorts of things can trigger long bouts of depression in your average NAMM unless he is trained to sort out the tragic inconveniences that can afflict a comfortable and care-free life.  Naturally scathing of anyone who “knows someone who can fix it” (which is one of those things a working-class person says, that you immediately distrust), a NAMM must learn to access information about the most widely recognised local tradesmen and to be able to research on the internet the true meaning of all the little icons next to the company name in the Thomson local or on their website.  (If they have no website, they’re cowboys so don’t use them.)  A NAMM will then expect the worst in terms of cost, feel they’ve got a deal if they charged any less and forever use that same tradesman confident that they don’t rip you off, because you didn’t notice that they had.

Mr Gove, of course, might dismiss my proposal, because he doesn’t foresee the NAMMs of the future being a particularly sizeable social group, given the financial constraints on access to Higher education for the working class, the unemployment levels in the under-25s and the fact that home-owning for the young is now a fucking Walt Disney fantasy pipe-dream.  There’ll be fewer and fewer lucky bastards like me who had his degree paid for and got on the property ladder when you didn’t need to put a kidney down as a deposit.

But maybe that’s all for the good.  All they do is write blogs, fret about how people drive and wish it was still 1982.