Who wants to be middle class?

PROUD NOT TO BE

I am working class. Oh yes I am. Don’t make me play Working Class Top Trumps with you because I’ll win. I’ve owned a Staffordshire bull terrier (Bess), I’ve holidayed in Tenerife, I have silver fillings. My godfather was a Geordie called Uncle Bob who sold sewing machines. I went to a comprehensive school — OK, when I could be arsed. There was no literature in my home aside from Jackie Collins smut from car-boot sales and a News of the World part-work on the Moors Murderers. In my youth I dated hot boys who lingered in young offenders’ institutions (oh, come on, those were the best ones). My teenage schoolfriends had babies with lads called Teabag, Gozzy and Bello.

If you met me in my natural habitat, up North, where I haven’t lived for 20 years now, you’d notice my accent slip within hours of stepping out of First Class on the Virgin West Coast Pendolino from the slightly clipped media London/Northern tones I’ve developed to a collection of indecipherable Scottish, Geordie and gypsy slang phrases.

I ended up writing a dozen books and being a broadsheet columnist, so nowadays I can afford Le Creuset, Club Class and Net-a-porter, but you can’t opt out of being working class. It’s in your bones. I have a scar on my arm from an NHS operation in the 1980s. My family go all-inclusive to the Dominican Republic. I am not fazed by a Toby Carvery. The list goes on.

I’m working class. In the future I shall inherit nothing aside from some fluffy slippers and a collection of Victorian figurines. Working is in my blood. And proper determined work. Four jobs at a time. Not ‘farting about retraining as a Reiki healer’ or ‘opening a dismal objets d’art boutique using some money Granny left me, which will go bust within two years as I’ve decided I want to try acting’. Oh no.

The middle classes are fascinating. I can watch them not working while pretending to work, for hours. Middle-class people always say to me, ‘Gosh, how do you survive being freelance? What gets you out of bed in the morning?’ To which the polite answer is: ‘I set two alarms,’ and the true answer is: ‘Because I need to work to buy things and plan for the future and keep me sane you spoilt “coasting along waiting for one of your aunties to cark it so you can inherit a big house in Cornwall and fit it with a Smallbone of Devizes kitchen and reclaimed church benches” nitwit.’

‘Oh Gracie,’ I hear you say, backing away in your Boden frock, shielding the ears of your tousle-haired Montessori-schooled children, Noah and Ophelia. ‘You sound very bitter. In fact, a bit chippy.’ ‘Fantastic,’ I say. I hope to God I never lose that working-class snark, no matter where life takes me. To little working-class girls and boys, I warn that whenever one points out the vast differences in background, opportunity and cushiness between yourself and the middle classes, you will be called ‘bitter’.

And if you’re reading this as a middle-class person thinking, ‘I need more of this working-class attitude,’ here are some useful starter tips. Try just being yourself and a little less worried what Genevieve three doors down thinks of you. Go to Wetherspoons with only a tenner and drink whatever wine they have on tap; eat egg and oven chips for dinner on a tray on your knee, watching Peter Andre; get your nails done in a shopping centre; try a little less John Lewis, a little more Argos; a little less Nigella, a little more inviting friends over, greeting them in George from Asda pyjama bottoms and handing them a Tokyo Express takeaway menu. Never complain, never explain. Sometimes buy scratchcards on a plane.

Personally, I’m quite relieved that since the day I got off the train at Euston in 1996, I never stopped noticing the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them’. It has never stopped thrilling and revolting me in turn. Like during one of my first work experience stints at a magazine where the editor kept the position open for one of Chris Patten’s daughters. And when the penny began to drop that all these people in power knew each other from the same school or Oxbridge. And that their mummy and daddy were always on hand to stump up wedding fees, house deposits and pay off student loans. I was pigging furious. For me, a working-class stubbornness set in. I’d simply have to make a success of things. I was not returning to Carlisle and working in a biscuit factory. I haven’t got the face shape for the hairnet and I can’t be trusted around big bags of misshaped mint Viscounts anyway.

To this day, I am powered by a love of blowing money in Fenwick, and a total refusal to live anywhere suburban where Zumba is considered a night out. Working class isn’t easy, but it works for me.

DESPERATE NOT TO BE

Last Christmas’ book market — those jokey non-fiction paperbacks that middle-class people buy other middle-class people to keep in their downstairs loos by the L’Occitane diffuser — featured many titles on the notion of being middle class. I contributed my wisdom to one, The Art Of Being Middle Class, after having spent the past 30 years chasing the elusive middle-class dream and being mildly obsessed with MC semantics, snobbisms, and reverse-snobbisms (‘Actually, we prefer prosecco to champagne’).