THERE are vanishingly few places left to meet that don’t serve chai and falafel. Savour these while you can:
Allotments
Leased to local residents for growing food, and not yet fully invaded by sanctimonious knobheads with acres of sanitised landscape surrounding their own houses. You can still meet working people cultivating oversized marrows, not twats trying to cut their farmers’ market spend by growing exotic flora to show off on Instagram.
Pre-match pub
Meeting mates in a local boozer is a working-class pre-match ritual which could easily be usurped by moisturised men on their way to hospitality. On match day, life’s problems are ignored for the topics: who’s injured and do we have time for another pint? Not bleating about renovating one’s Welsh farmhouse. Finish your craft gin and f**k off.
The dog track
Greyhound racing is still some way from gentrification. If it succumbed, there would be no winners, only social and cultural losers. The middle-classes would enter their Labradoodles, cut out the barbaric racing and replace the hare with a bone-shaped tofu treat. They’re kept away by the fear poverty is contagious.
Car boot sales
If you’re going to a car boot to pull racks of last season’s gilets out of your Mini Countryman, don’t. Nobody will pay £6 for your homemade chutneys. Nor should you belittle sellers by asking if they take Apple Pay for a ten pence ornament or bully browsers into buying your tat because it’s ethically sourced. Get ripped off or go home.
The darts
A traditional pub sport which rarely features at dinner parties, darts remains working class. Large flamboyant events where shitfaced punters wear fancy dress are not aspirational. As such, it is unfit for annexation by smug twats in witty handmade costumes, sipping Pinot Noir whilst holding a sign to the TV camera reminding husband Simon that ‘Gaston has oboe practice after school tomorrow’. You’ve got Wimbledon, stick to that.
