MEETING someone new and middle-class? They may assume, seeing you in your Reiss suit, that you’re just like them when actually you’re better. Drop in these class markers:
Mention your dad was a roofer
It doesn’t matter what you’re discussing: Brexit, sushi, penguins or the novels of Elizabeth Strout, it’s relevant. It’s even better if you say ‘is’, suggesting he cannot afford to give up work even into his 60s. They don’t know he’s got his own firm and sits on his arse all day.
Explain your mum doesn’t get what you do
Unlikely, considering your job isn’t that hard to comprehend. It’s more a reflection of the fact she can’t understand why they pay you for that when you’re always pissing about at home. But it hints at the drama caused by your rise from a terraced house to the heights of digital services advisor.
Call school ‘the comprehensive’
Force it in even if it wasn’t in the school’s name. Act as though your perfectly pleasant state school was rife with guns, gangs and knife attacks. To be fair there was once a fight in the playground. Wait, no, a dog. There was a dog in the playground.
Emphasise your lack of learning
You wish you could understand the world like the well-educated – things like quinoa, financial instruments, the plays of Sarah Kane – but you can’t, because of your schooling. Admittedly that was because you skipped lessons to smoke, but surely that’s society’s fault? To this day, it’s hurtful how little you know about Molière’s comedies.
Exaggerate your accent
Even if your area doesn’t have a particularly charming rural accent, you can put on a general Cockney lilt, like a child in a 1950s film. Your attempt to deploy it at the garage for a lower rate on a new exhaust is unsuccessful. He must have gone to public school.
Punch them hard in the face
None of it working? Resort to violence, then explain that was how people communicated in the harsh cobbled streets where you grew up. A clip round the ear was affection, a punch was an expression of camaraderie and being knocked to the floor and stamped on was a warm embrace from a beloved grandparent. That should get it through to them.
