On Being Middle Class

[clovehitched]

OK, so I freely admit that I'm irredeemably middle class. I live in the middle of Cambridge. I previously worked in microelectronics. I drive a Toyota Prius. I'm writing this on an Apple laptop resting on my cherry wood dining table. Looking up at the bookshelf, I see books by Carl Sagan and China Mieville. I'm about to get married in a Cambridge college. I don't just drink Scotch, I drink single malt Islay whisky, I own a wok and chopsticks (and am proficient with them), and so on.

But I do at least take comfort from not being like these people.

I mean, I don't even know what quinoa is, and in a sort of inverted snobbery, remnants of my east midlands coalfields upbringing kinda way, regard this as probably a good thing.

But then I realised that when I'm feeling inexplicably tired, and want properly waking up with a nice cup of builder's tea, with milk and sugar, rather than some of the green earl grey, or white jasmine, or rooibos, or sencha that I have in my cupboard, the "builder's tea" I end up making is Assam, brewed in a Bodum glass teapot, whitened with milk from a bottle that was delivered to my doorstep this morning, sweetened with unrefined brown cane sugar. This led to realising the awful, awful truth; while I may never buy an Aga (and please shoot me if I do), and regard organic food as being "a bit of a con, really", I really, really am like those people.

I'm doomed!

Comments

[bloodbeauty.livejournal.com]

on the subject of supper... i'd say supper is what i'd eat if i was hungry later in the evening after dinner
tea i'd eat around four o'clock with tea and cake and perhaps sandwiches
lunch at lunchtime
elevenises at midmorning
breakfast...

less middle class more hobbit i fear...

what is ones opinion of brunch?

[alicephilippa.livejournal.com]

The Scot in me wants to call the main evening meal supper. The Northern working class upbringing wants to call it tea. Most often I'll call it dinner, but I was brought up to call the mid-day meal dinner, not lunch.

Brunch is a horrid word. First meal of the day matter what time is breakfast.

[phonemonkey.livejournal.com]

My Bristolian middle-class mother always called it supper, and my Manchester Jewish working-class dad always called it tea.

I now realise that it's one of those things that I've spent much of my life actively avoiding using a word for, because I got teased for being posh at school but wasn't posh enough at university.

[hazelstitch.livejournal.com]

I grew up with breakfast, lunch and dinner (or evening meal as we advertised it for the guest house) mostly use tea for the evening, but if I am going out, I go out for dinner.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Brunch? Isn't that something that our American cousins get up to? Or even le slunch (something between elevenses and lunch which is a recent Franglais expression I came across in a French cookery mag :o)