HAVE you risen from humble origins to become part of the middle class? Do you need to remind people of that at every opportunity? Here’s how:
Support a shit football team
The middle-classes steal the authenticity from everything, but they’re too terrified of failure to support a genuinely crap team. Make a show of your loyalty to Carlisle United, Coventry City or Derby and they’ll edge away as if it’s catching.
Loudly extol the virtues of ‘proper food’
While enjoying braised partridge with polenta at a friends, repeatedly tell everyone it’ll never live up to the mushy peas, cockles in vinegar or bacon oatcakes of your youth, while never eating that stuff and shovelling in fancy gastropub dinners two-handed.
Smoke after one drink
After no more than one pint produce a packet of cigarettes from nowhere and light up while offering them around to your horrified companions, shrugging your shoulders at any cancer risk because everyone used to smoke 40 a day and they were fine.
Be sickened at how you’re spoiling your own children
Never miss an opportunity to stress how disgusted you are with the material advantages you yourself provide to your own children. “Kills me how they’re always plugged into these iPhones. I did two paper rounds for a year to buy a ZX Spectrum. 16k.”
Read the Sun for the sport
Yes the Guardian has a sports section, but you can’t fundamentally trust the views of anyone who only discovered darts watching it ironically at university. The Sun would never say that climate change was more important than Liverpool vs Chelsea, and rightly so.
Go on proper foreign holidays
None of this ‘gîte in France’ or ‘farmhouse in Tuscany’ bollocks for your family. Try three weeks in California, a week at a private beach in Jamaica or a hot-air balloon flights over the Serengeti. And you take them in term-time.
