What is middle class?

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  • RicFRicF ✭✭✭

    The image is crap due to the limit of 250kb. If you saw the original 2mega plus job you can read every detail.

    All sorts are there including a book on origami by the very late Robert Harbin plus a couple of books on 'pig hunting'. 

    🙂

  • NayanNayan ✭✭✭
    Every generation seems to think that it's own recession, stock market crash or whatever is the worst one ever.



    Some persoective is needed here- in plenty of cases living on benefits now probably still gets you a better standard of living than being working class/lower middle class in the 70s
  • I find the term working class amusing because anyone who works is obviously working class. Do middle class folk mddle for a living?? Or do the work and are therefore actuall working class folk with books?
  • I had a Robert Harbin origami book! Wasn't he on TV as well, with an enigmatic female fellow-folder?

  • booktrunk wrote (see)
    a

    You can tell a middle-class person by how they speak mostly. I know straight off that a person who responds to something by saying 'a' is lower- or working class. image

  • NayanNayan ✭✭✭
    "Work is the curse of the drinking classes."



    Oscar Wilde
  • Does it matter?

    I don't consider myself to be any better or worse than anyone who would be described as a class different to me (I would probably fit in the middle class description based on how I compare to the indicators in most commentaries on the subject).  Just because someone has been born rich or poor, has a title or no home, doesn't make them a more or less valuable person.

    Time we started talking about "pillock class", "celebrity class" and "genuine class" - much more relevant to today's world.

  • Being a triathlete ?

  • What ever class you are in, are you happy ?

    I would rather be happy as a tramp, than miserable as a king.

  • Boo- being a triathlete is not middle class, it is mid life crisis and mddle of the road.
  • I have books but shop at bargain supermarkets; I place myself firmly in the Lidl Class. image

    Have a good day. image
  • OK this thread seems to have taken the direction of, you are middle class by the books you read

    So my last three books purchased are ( 2  from the Hay book festival )

    1- Daily life in Greece at the time of Pericles by Robert Flaceliere

    2-A History of Greece by C.W.C.OMAN

    3- The Kite Runner by ? and if you have not read the last one I would recommend as it's the best book I have ever read

     

     

  • Most of my books are history books. The last three I bought were about the  Home Front in WW2, "At Day's Close"  which is basically a a history of night time and "Treasure Island" which I was in a stage production of.

     

  • RicFRicF ✭✭✭

    I've masses of books but I don't read them. They just sit there having been looked at maybe once. Some which I've inherited haven't been read at all.

    I guess if you're one of those people who remembers everything they've ever read; and they are a lot more common than I realised, then reading stuff must be fun.

    In my case, I'd guess about 0.001% might stick so it's a waste of effort. 

    🙂

  • Interesting - I would say I'm middle class now, but the product of resolutely working class parents (although I would probably classify them as middle class now, also - but never to my dad's face!).

    Hubby and I have books numbering in the high hundreds, I would guess, but my parents have literary thousands of books - everywhere! Their house smells bookish and musty. Growing up we never had a TV - only the radio, board games and books... and more books. It was definitely a working class upbringing, but having books was normal.

    As for the last books I bought - eclectic, to say the least...

    Lee Child, Personal (Jack Reacher no. 19) - bubblegum for the brain;

    Ion Mobility Spectrometry, Eiceman, Karpas & Hill - work related;

    Shale Gas and Fracking, the Science Behind the Controversy, Stephenson - part work related, part interest;

    Quick Strength for Runners, Horowitz - interest.

    RicF - for me reading is like watching a film is for some people (I think). I definitely remember everything I read - it even influences my dreams. I have been known to pace up and down while reading and exclaim, and speak to the characters, because I've been so gripped by the story and the images it portrays (Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd elicited this response - if anyone's interested).

  • I have thousands of books, though my house doesn't smell. I don't remember everything I read, and I don't see why the pleasure of reading should come from remembering it afterwards, rather than while actually doing it. If reading were just about obtaining information from books people wouldn't choose to read the same ones more than once.

  • Enjoyment of an experience is such an individual thing - be it immediate at the time or persisting through memory. I certainly agree that reading should not be dismissed as unenjoyable due to a lack of persistence of memory of the content.

    The musty smell is compounded by being in an old house in permanently damp Cornwall, and only having central heating installed about a year ago - it's getting better now! image

  • Little Neil, never have I cried reading a book until I read Kite runner, a book I will never  forget.  I delayed reading chapters so as to savour every word, line, sentence.

  • My books are all sci-fi, fantasy, and crime novels. 

    I read to escape the real world. 

  • I don't see the point of keeping every book Ive ever read .  these days they're just clutter, like cd's. Some books I read again and again, like Birdsong, or The English Patient, but if I read a Lee Child or Jo Nesbo it goes straight to Oxfam When it's finished.

    the last books I bought were Funny Girl by Nick Hornby, Run Wild by Boff Whalley and the son by Jo Nesbo to read on holiday. 

     

  • Mokshaeight - agree about Kite Runner - fabulous book. (Khaled Hosseini is the author).

    I've bought less books since I bought my Kindle. It's not the same as the feel of a book, but takes up much less space.  It's also far too easy to buy books on it, because you don't have to worry whether there's space on the bookshelf. I may have bought more books than I will ever have time to read.image

  • NayanNayan ✭✭✭

    Ive been reading too much about running.

    I've picked up some stuff relating to the hypothetical colonisation of Mars lately and might make that a theme for a bit. 

  • Read the bullshit Novel by Andy Weir, quite entertaining fluff and with a few quite technical bits in it.

  • I don't work. That makes me lazy class. image

  • Don't think I've read any fiction for years, mainly factual stuff these days, and I'm intrigued by the one Nayan cites.

    Triathlon is a good shout for middle class, lot of expense on something non-essential, or those that travel (abroad) to race. You could widen it to anyone who spends more than truly necessary to fund a hobby.

    Makes me laugh though as I suspect those that deny it the most, probably are..

  • This whole conversation has all become a tad middle class.



    Dustin, so by your thinking, are those who claim to be middle class actually not? And are they working or upper class?



    I see those who claim to be middle class as being like hyacinth bucket. Those above and below just see them as a group that tries too hard to be something which they are not. Traditionally Middle class folk wouldn't need to discuss their position.
  • Not at all, those that come from a so called working class background now find themselves doing "OK" but won't want to admit it.

    Very broadly speaking, sizeable chunks of the UK (& the west) now probably are middle class. Home ownership, multiple cars, holiday more than once a year, weekend breaks, kids activities, generally fewer (no) children, hobbies with a material cost, mobile phones, multiple household ownerhsip of ipad/tablets/laptops...

    Sure there are those that truly are either side, but the bell curve of incomes over time has drifted right.

  • Dustin wrote (see)

    Not at all, those that come from a so called working class background now find themselves doing "OK" but won't want to admit it.

    Very broadly speaking, sizeable chunks of the UK (& the west) now probably are middle class. Home ownership, multiple cars, holiday more than once a year, weekend breaks, kids activities, generally fewer (no) children, hobbies with a material cost, mobile phones, multiple household ownerhsip of ipad/tablets/laptops...

    Sure there are those that truly are either side, but the bell curve of incomes over time has drifted right.

    Whatever that's the definition of, I'm it.

    Is it linked to generation? - as in how many generations of your family have been x class before you are comfortable being labelled as that.  For instance, I'm an accountant, my father was a pharmacist, but his father was a tailor (who's hummung?) and his grandfather was a "commercial agent".  My mother was a legal secretary, her father was an ironturner, and her grandfather was a locomotive driver.  Further back we have farm labourers and seamstresses in our line. 

    Personally I don't give a monkeys how people view me, but I do know that I am considerably more comfortably off than previous generations of my family, and probably the first female who is financially independent.  Whether that has shifted my class, or just my wealth bracket, I don't know.

  • RicFRicF ✭✭✭

    I tend to think of Gerry and Margo in the Good Life as being the definitive middle class.

    It's a little more complicated these days.

    🙂

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