The English

A discussion elsewhere. So, which bits of this do *you* disagree with?

Yes, this is a lovely wander through the intricacies of both regional and class namings. I’m not sure that it’s actually possible to be both declarative and correct here, such are the complexities. Tea as in a cup of tea and a biccie can be sprung upon anyone anytime between breakfast and the evening meal. Before breakfast it is unaccompanied by the biccie, of course. Tea as in tea with a cake and maybe sarnies with the crusts cut off is a 4 pm thing – afternoon tea. If it happens between breakfast and lunch it is elevensies, not second breakfast. Luncheon is archaic now but lunch at midday is both southern and middle to upper class, dinner at midday – a hot, cooked meal – is both working and northern. Not sure about now but certainly up into the 70s in the Army the noon/1pm meal was always, but always, dinner for the troops and lunch for the officers. Dinner is middle and upper/southern for the cooked meal at 7 to 8 pm. Tea is northern and working for the same hot meal but at 5 to 6 pm. The distinction rests, more than a bit, on whether you go to the pub before or after eating. Out of the factory, eat, to the pub, that’s tea. Out of the office, couple of pints, home to eat, that’s dinner. Plus that class and region thing. “Pub” here also means drinks party, a viewing at the gallery, darts match etc – eating before or after the evening activity. Supper is the snack when fully and finally at home to make sure of sweet dreams – strong cheese is often involved.

Which leaves high tea. To my southern and middle sensibilities this is more a kiddy thing. Feed ’em a hot meal at 5 to 6 pm. Ham and eggs say – but accompanied by sarnies and cake as well. But can also be an adult thing, if there’s an evening activity which makes dinner difficult – so something hot to be had with afternoon tea before going out to do the whatever.

About the only thing we’ll all agree upon with all of this is that “high tea” is not just the extra added cake version of normal afternoon tea. It’s a little later – an hour or two perhaps – and comes with a plate of hot food as well as cake.

The grand joy of all of the above is that anyone not sharing my priors – middy southerner – will disagree with some or all of this.

Ministers are considering a shake-up of the government’s social mobility watchdog that could range from giving it more teeth to abolishing it outright.

The move comes amid concerns that the Social Mobility Commission (SMC) – originally conceived under Gordon Brown’s government in 2010 – has become ineffective.

Class in Britain – one’s social level perhaps – has never actually been about economics. Not that government really has switches they can flip about economics and incomes of individials anyway. But the idea that they have control of how other people at large regard and determine the class of those they view is truly absurd.

Our Ange is fairly rich and very powerful – as is Ms. Haigh – but neither are going to be described as class acts. That’s just the way this country runs. So trying to determine it centrally ……..

Birds masturbate, and that’s perfectly normal

Sure, it’s true either way, but that headline might have been written a little differently in a colloquial English speaking country….

The true “middle class”? You’ll find it around the median salary of £39,039, the midpoint where half the population earns more and half less.

I mean, of all people. Class, in England, is only tenuously conected to income. As Pollyanna should know herself, obviously.

Or, Britons, to taste:

The Zetland estates were acquired in the 18th century by Sir Lawrence Dundas, scion of a long-established Scots family, who became the chief merchant-adventurer of his day. Having made a fortune supplying bread and forage to allied troops in Germany during the Seven Years’ War, he bought swathes of land in Sligo, Roscommon, Fife, Stirlingshire, Clackmannanshire, Orkney, Shetland, Hertfordshire and Yorkshire, where Aske Hall, near Richmond, remains the family seat.
…
Dubbed “the Nabob of the North”, Dundas became among the country’s largest landowners, but despite his best endeavours he never obtained a peerage – he was a mere baronet by the time he died in 1781.

His son, though, was made Baron Dundas in 1794, his grandson rose to Earl of Zetland (an ancient variant of Shetland), and the 3rd earl became a marquess in 1892.

Spivvy lad* becomes vastly wealthy.

But he does not become a Lord, ho no, merely a Bt. The son becomes a Lord, the grandson an Earl and the gg grandson a Marquess having been a government minister and all that.

You’re not a real nob until the money has matured, see?

*You do not make a fortune out of military logistics without being spivvy.

It’s far from easy being a northerner in spaces and places where the default identity is southern. Still, we survive.

In ways many and varied. When I moved to London after university, I found myself further eradicating traces of the broad vowels my family and friends at home all had. I felt a need to blend in, to not stand out. A lot of this was subconscious, driven probably by various mean comments I had encountered during my lifetime, whether directed at me or not. Sometimes, the slights were indirect: hearing people put on a northern accent, for example, to do an impression of someone stupid or unsophisticated. Other times they were very direct, like all the comments about how “racist northerners” caused Brexit.

If we allow you the opportunity to escape from that void, that nothingness, to the civilisation that exists south of the A4 then of course you should adapt to your new environment. That’s the whole point, you are being exposed to civilisation, a life of value and worth, for the first time. Why else would you make the weary trudge from howling wasteland to the England that is and was?

Just to remind about London, the A4 is the Marylebone Road. You’re not actually achieving the aim and goal unless you’re south of that. Yes, this does mean Islington is still The North – which explains those who live there.

The new year got off to an anticlimactic start for hundreds of people in Birmingham who were tricked into attending a non-existent New Year’s Eve fireworks display. Again.

Crowds of revellers gathered in the city’s Centenary Square, hoping to catch a glimpse of a pyrotechnics display to welcome in 2026.

They were left disappointed, however, after they discovered no display would be taking place and that they had fallen victim to false news spread online.

A similar incident happened last year, when thousands of people gathered in the city centre after claims online promised a spectacular display with food vendors and performances.

Not to be elitist, culturalist, or anything but they’ve not exactly got a reputation for crafty and bright – like Cockneys – do they?

What was your childhood home like?
We moved into a prefab in 1948, when I was six, on a rodent-infested street [in Tredegar, a town in south Wales].

Calling the Welsh rats like that…..

Country folk have a new reason to hate Londoners: drivers from the capital are significantly more likely to be involved in collisions on rural roads.
A survey of 2,000 motorists found that 38 per cent of those from the capital had been in a crash on a country road, compared with 23 per cent of the general population.

Londoners actually driving in London move at an average pace of 8 milles an hour or whatever. They’re thus unable to cope with speeds of about a determined stride out.

Starmer to unveil digital ID cards in plan set to ignite civil liberties row
‘Brit card’ already facing opposition from privacy campaigners as government looks for ways to tackle illegal immigration

A “Brit” card would be the most un-English thing ever. And yes, I do mean un-English. Who cares what the Celts think?

It took only a term at Oxford to lose my Grimsby accent
It’s freshers week and thousands of young people are about to sound very different. By Kate Bunn

That’s why he took a stack of George Formby records with him to listen to. So that the socialist revolutionary would not lose his oik accent.

One of those stories just far, far, too good to bother to check despite there being echoes of it further back in history related to other lumpen determined to remain so.

It’s probably true that a party worker shouldn’t be saying such things about an old girlfriend of the party leader.

A particularly vibrant game of fuck, marry, kill, is also something I don’t think is misogynistic nor, wholly, a capital crime requiring the execution of a public career. But maybe that’s just me.

Sure, sure, it’s not particularly erudite and it’s certainly not polite but in the list of potential sins it’s really pretty venial. We are, after all, English, the defining feature of us has long been noted as being that we take the piss out of everything and use the rather base language and habits of Anglo Saxon to do so.

The organisers of the Great North Run have apologised after finisher T-shirts and medals were printed with a map of rival north-east city Sunderland instead of Newcastle.

About 60,000 people took part in the half marathon on Sunday, running 13.1 miles from the centre of Newcastle, across the River Tyne, and through Gateshead, finishing by the coast in South Shields.

After receiving their finishers’ merchandise, runners noticed that the river on their T-shirts and medals matched the shape of the north-east’s other famous river and not Newcastle’s Tyne.

While the map on the medal has been printed with the words “Newcastle”, “Gateshead”, and “South Shields”, they appear to have been overlaid on to a map of Sunderland’s streets, shown either side of the River Wear.

They’ve actually gone to the trouble of giving names to different parts of it, have they? That void, the beyond the A4. Still, I suppose it comforts them in their sad acceptance that they are not of civilisation, to pretend that any one part of the morass is distinguishable from any other.

Pity, not hate, is the correct reaction among us gentle folk. Look how they try to ape us….

A failure to ensure that white working-class children succeed is holding back Britain, the Education Secretary has said.

Ahead of GCSE results day on Thursday, Bridget Phillipson warned that four-fifths of children from white working-class backgrounds were falling short in the English and maths skills required to get on in life.

A little-discussed aspect of the British class system — which, thankfully, everyone has stopped pretending doesn’t still exist — is that one doesn’t have to be pure bred. The categories aren’t as rigid as you think. It’s not just “underclass, working class, middle class, posh”. You can be a hybrid of these classes — like a human cockapoo, or a griffin.

For example: David Beckham. Sir David Beckham now — and, therefore, a member of the most upper. Even without his title, David Beckham’s adult life is like that of a prince or a king. Multiple houses, private yachts and jets, and the financial freedom to do pretty much whatever he wants, whenever he wants. Indeed, Beckham — estimated fortune, together with his wife, £500 million — is much, much richer than either the King of Belgium (€12.4 million, or £10.6 million) or the King of Spain (only €2.6 million, apparently, although he does have access to a lot of palaces, which must be a comfort).

And yet recently, when dining at the Michelin-starred Core by Clare Smyth in Notting Hill, London, Sir David eschewed the seven-course £255 menu and requested a pie — served with Bisto. Made from instant granules. £2.95 from Sainsbury’s.

At this moment, I hope we can all observe that while Beckham isn’t financially or materially working class any more, he is still, in some aspects, culturally working class.

This isn’t a little discussed aspect of class in England. It’s the heart and the core of class in England and always has been. The very centre of most comedies of manners for example.

Sheesh, and in The Times too. Tempora, mores etc etc eheu.

The 2024 film Saltburn focuses on university classism

OK. Then they use this piccie (here shown in The Guardian).

Which shows someone in black tie – an already tied black tie! – with a wing collar.

Good grief, they letting Americans in these days or something?

Two friends have accused an Airbnb host of “xenophobia” after they were rejected for a room booking because they were Welsh.

Jemma Louise Gough, 38, and Jamie Lee Watkins, 37, had been trying to book an £83 double room for one night at the property in Manchester.

No Welsh within the walls overnight.

Or was that Chester, without the Man bit?

The usually tranquil roads were busy as guests arrived in Mercedes vans at the small medieval parish church of St Michael and All Angels in Great Tew. Nine bridesmaids, including Jessica Springsteen, daughter of Bruce and a show-jumping champion, wore crimson gowns to match the 5ft balls of roses decorating the outside of the church.

As any student of Britain knows, class doesn’t change in hte one generation. Over three it definitely does. Two sometimes.

True, true, this is an American but the same rule applies.

Alan Sugar is indeed a Lord and very very rich. It’s his grandkids who are going to marry Viscounts etc.

A bonfire in Northern Ireland topped with a model migrant dinghy and a sign reading “stop the boats” has been set alight as police investigate the display as a hate crime.

The correct answer is “Fuck off”. Even, fuck right off.

They used to burn effigies of the Pope at these things after all.

People writing about class in England without understanding class in England:

The idea that the gentry is a fallen group is perhaps based on an optimistic misconception about what you have to do to remain rich in modern capitalist societies. In fact, you can live off existing wealth. But it’s more than that. If we were to look at the richest 1% through time, we might see families dipping in and out of the group: a wealthy CEO passes money to their children, who remain in the top echelon; but their grandchildren perhaps then fall out of it. Among the aristocracy, though, family lines have managed to sustain themselves in the 1% over many generations. Why? After all, the titled few have just as much, or as little, control over how their children turn out as other wealthy people. Why is it that aristocratic wealth persists and other types often burn out?

Bond and Morton have two possible answers, both of which concern cultural traditions. One is that members of this group are particularly concerned with their dynastic reputation, which prompts them to keep assets together rather than split them between multiple inheritors. The other is that they have a long history of managing money. We think of this group as being out of touch and out of time. “In fact, they are canny wealth managers,” says Morton. “The image of the bumbling aristocrat is false.”

It’s because the aristos marry money.

Alan Sugar is indeed a peer but he’s not an aristo. His grandchildren probably will marry into the aristocracy – or at least the county gentry. Because that’s what the aristos do – marry into money in order to get that roof replaced.

How anyone could observe British class and not note the influx of American brides in the Victorian era is just an absurdity. The bird got the title, Daddy who makde the money got a grandson who would be a Marquis and the roof got repaired.

The aristos haven’t “maintained” their fortunes. They’ve married money without class over the generations. Each side selling what they’ve got.

Sheesh.