Classy man.

I’m drinking an Americano while I wait for my daughter’s ballet class to end. As I sit and sip on this pleasant Irish day, the thought occurs that this moment probably represents ‘peak middle class’ in my life so far. Ballet didn’t feature much in my youth or indeed, at all. There may have been ballet schools in the nearest big town but no one I knew went to such a place. 

I grew up working class. No ifs or buts. Throughout my childhood I lived in a succession of council houses except for the time when my parents moved their young family to the Highlands and we lived in a rented caravan.  I was an inmate of three local state schools for the length of my juvenile education and the idea of seeking any kind of private education would have seemed alien to us. School wasn’t something that came in a ‘pick n mix’ option, you just went to whichever was closest. My parents both had to work a selection of service jobs and ‘comfortable’ was an aspiration rather than a reality.

Our village was a popular tourist destination and so I had access to cheap swimming, golf, ice skating and skiing amongst other activities as I grew up. These were often supplied through school as part of the PE curriculum or via after-school clubs, and because of these activities I would suggest that the local area had a greater than average proportion of working-class golfers, working-class skiers, working-class tennis players and so on.

Due to this exposure to a range of activities I became obsessively sporting especially with regards to skiing. I went out every weekend in the winter and most days after school. Trudging repeatedly up a local hill was a small price to pay for the joy of the descent and the more I skied, the less I wanted to do anything else. Nothing came close to the feeling of cruising down an empty slope on a remote mountainside or crashing through moguls with limbs flying in all directions like some convulsing ragdoll. The sub-zero addiction brought me into contact with people from around the world who had set up in the Scottish Highlands for one or more seasons and they, in turn expanded the range of possible life choices for a boy from the back end of nowhere. It was certainly a broader range of career options than my school guidance teacher was willing to discuss.

When the time came to leave education therefore, I chose heart over head and decided to eschew university and forge a dynamic career in the outdoor sports and travel sector or, to use slightly less LinkedIn phrasing, became a ski bum and went off to get paid for overacting on snow. I worked in several countries and more than one continent with people from many walks of life, mostly but not always, from wealthier backgrounds. No matter the surroundings and the company I kept though, I was still comfortably working-class in my head. Years later I belatedly went to university and amongst the predominantly middle-class student population I remained, mentally a working-class boy. Throughout my life, in fact and despite my nomadic existence where I was called upon to blend into different cultures, I have had no doubt that ‘working-class’ was exactly what I was. 

Until now, when I feel that things are no longer as cut and dried as once, they were. 

I work in retail and live in rented accommodation but I have a degree and my daughter goes to dance and horse-riding lessons. Away from the day job I write articles for pleasure and profit and continue working on a book and while Alan Sillitoe and John Braine were part of a working-class wave of authors in the post-war period, writing and the arts generally, seems to have reverted to being an area dominated by the privately educated and AB classes.

I have no doubt that a cleverer man than I would be able to produce all manner of data to pinpoint exactly where I stand on the socio-economic staircase but to me something that was once very simple now seems a bit more complicated than it was and my ruminations on the subject have alas left me no clearer than before I started.

So, I will finish this short post with a question about your experience of class and identity. How do you see yourself socially and has this changed since your childhood?

Having failed to provide a clear answer in these reflections I will hope for further enlightenment from the public at large.

In the meantime, there is definitely time for another Americano.