Poor Man About Town

There is a lot of snob value in the French Language. GCSE O Level is spoken and understood by only those who have learned it. Trust me, I have been to France on numerous occasions and my O Level French is always met with the incredulity that I may as well be speaking Classical Hebrew. I tried this tack in Paris, I spoke O Level French through the nose and successfully got une biere, une chambre dans l'hotel, un cafe.

When I read Tolstoy's War and Peace, the main characters were conversing with each other in French; it was Tolstoy's mechanism that the aristocracy and rich people separated themselves from the Russian Plebs. The richest irony in the book is that the Napoleonic Army invades the land and poses this class under immediate threat.

I was in Dulwich today, discovered that a hairdresser was called "Coiffure" and a baby accessory shop called Jojo Maman Bébé. (Who the fuck is Jojo?, the erstwhile Dad who's done a bunk on the child maintenance?) There is a burgeoning snob community in East Dulwich. Anything like this would pander to this breed of people who are no doubt New Model Parents, M & S shoppers and all the bullshit which comes with them.

Labels: Class, consumerism, french language, snob, snobbery

Class is alive and kicking in this country, don't let anyone kid you otherwise. While waiting for a bus, a twelve year old woman passed me by babbling into her mobile, I caught these words "It like changed my life?" - It was not a question but an inflection which made the phrase sound like an inflection. Her accent had the usual crisp middle class tones but lightly peppered with American - Valley Girl sprung to mind. Given all of this, I could not imagine her barging a pushchair on to a bus in ten years time.

My guess is that in thirty years time, her kind of dialect will become the received pronounciation whereas "ya know wot I min" will be left to the rest of us.

Labels: accents, Class, English, language

I had to attend an out-patient appointment today. There were quite a few magazines lying around. The choice was varied - Sunday supplements, lifestyle mags, true stories and celebrity mags. What struck me was the class divide between the mags. The lifestyle and supplement mags were clearly geared towards the middle-class nest builders - all of which insisted on force feeding crap and more crap to the already bloated middle stratum of society. The photos looked very cosy, nice clean photographs of nice clean and healthy people (the ethnicity of which is invariably white) - the couples look happy and look as if they are about to go on holiday to Barbados. Then you have the products, face creams made from the mud of the Borneo jungle, the bollocks of rare goats steeped in olive oil and balsamic vinegar, furniture made from one of the last surviving rain forests in South America...

Then we come to the magazines aimed at the working class - the true stories - grainy and out of focus home produced photos - the highly graphic stories were invariably tragic - wife beaters nearly beating women to death with pokers and pick axe handles; wives poisoning their husband; children being physically and sexually abused - these mags were selling stories of the front line of working class tragedy. None of the middle class angst that one finds in middle-class childless couples. These true-life stories made rather painful reading. Has the working class really become this pit of depravity!

Then we have the Celebrity Mags, obviously directed towards the working class - celebs in expensive homes - it is as if they are not making any suggestion of aspiration, more like to say "look at what we have got, you pathetic plebs"

Whoever says that we live in a classless society needs to have his / her head testing.

Labels: Class, Lifestyle, media

It's M & S Bullshit.

There is sub-class of the middle-class. Like the working class, the middle class has its lumpen element too. They are the sort of people to whom M & S directs its get on your nerves campaign (why not, New Labour has been successful with this horrible lot).

These people get on your nerves and in your face. They fill up your favourite restaurants with kiddies birthday parties that make the place sound a battery farm. They are making housing unaffordable by buying up property that they do not really need but as an investment. They are responsible for those horrible lifestyle programmes on television by generating the demand for this crap - they are culturally shallow that it must come of the 'accessible' flatpack, viz "Chill Out Classical". Their ideology is competitive and tread on your head. They drive those horrendous vehicles that look like a cross between a hearse and a Securicor van with which they clog up the roads in the mornings because they insist on driving their adult children to school. They barge around the supermarket as if they were driving the said vehicles, they carry the usual countenance "get the fuck out of my way". Gosh! they are so ill-mannered that they would not be able to live amongst a troop of baboons! I am going to give this sub-class a name - M&ndieS - pronounced Mandies. All we need is an economic and these buggers will come tumbling down to the nearest Homeless Families' Unit along with their horrible kids - that'd be fun.

Labels: Class