A class act

Ah, class. It used to be that everyone knew where they stood in the class system, you were either Ronnie Corbett, Ronnie Barker or John Cleese. What class you were was determined, back when the world was black and white, by height, apparently.

It used to be much simpler, back when the world was colourful, but two dimensional. You were either a monarch, somebody who owned a castle, or a peasant. Class in those days was largely a matter of how filthy you were and how largely root vegetables featured in your diet. If you ended the day covered in pig-shit and looking forward to a hearty meal of a parsnip, you were a serf. If however you owned your own castle, had a selection of falcons and dined off hunks of things that only featured parsnip as something to help soak up the gravy, then congratulations, you can look forward to dying of the pox or in a crusade but until then, enjoy yourself!

Things became complicated with the introduction of the printing press, the artisan class and merchants, leading to people without castles having more money than people with castles, a situation that continues today, largely because of the cost of maintaining a castle (and also of course to that particular condition that afflicts the landed gentry: their bitter resentment of any member of the National Trust). Moats, as anyone who has scrutinised MPs expenses will know, are expensive to clean out. Must be all the pike-men and bits of siege equipment that presumably get stuck in the filters.

Britain is to class what Catholicism is to religion, taking a very simple concept and wildly complicating it. Other countries react differently to class. The French decapitated all of their aristocracy and hence now have no class at all, while in the rest of Europe the upper classes seem slightly embarrassed about having wealth and power and so reside in large residences far from commoners. The American system is slightly different and can best be described, as I read somewhere, by the following: if your name is on a building, you’re doing very well, if your name is on a desk, you’re doing OK and if your name is on a badge pinned to a shirt that features a corporate logo, you’re fucked.

Now we have not just your basic classes of; aristocracy, gentry, upper class, middle class, working class, lower class and underclass, but many sub-categories of class. And while the British are very good at identifying what class other people are (‘posh idiot’, ‘chav scum’ or ‘foreign’ for instance), they are less well able to categorise themselves, and terrified of asking in case somebody actually tells them.

The problem with Brits is that they consider that there is social mobility inside the class structure. Worse still is that those folk most acutely aware of the class structure are often the most uncomfortable when speaking to people from outside their own class. For instance, when speaking to tradesman, a middle class person will, if they have prepared properly for the occasion, have a variety of conversational gambits, usually sport related. This is partly because middle class people like to believe they can ‘get on’ with anyone, but mostly because they are trying to avoid the 30% middle-class surcharge that they secretly believe tradesmen apply to anyone who drives an audi.

They’re wrong of course, it’s actually 33%.

Gentry of course just treat everyone exactly the same. Unfortunately they do this by being universally ghastly.

This does not stop middle class people wanting to access the world of the upper classes and recently great steps have been taken to achieve this. Prior to the broadcast of ‘Downton Abby’ however, the sole guide to how to behave at a country house party was the writing of P G Wodehouse or Agatha Christie. Hence, if one were to be invited to spend the weekend at a country house, one would reasonably expect to spend one’s time either attempting to steal cow creamers and involving oneself in hi-jinks in the shrubbery, or beating the host to death with a candlestick in the library.

Hold on, isn’t that Cluedo? Boardgames, how very middle-class.