How this post came about…….
It came about one night in the local bearpit (A&E department) while waiting for Jackie to be triaged : given that there were some 170 people already in the department and more than a hundred in the ambulatory section (what I call walking wounded) it was looking to be a long wait. In the department there’s a status board being updated every time a patient is triaged so there’s a continuously changing time of wait for triage and another estimate of time to first medical review which was running at 6-7 hours even then. As I sat and watched, the time to triage went up and up and I think peaked at two hours plus – and that’s just for initial triage. I had nothing to do so I sat and watched whatever dire choice of TV station the screen next to the status board was tuned to.
Why oh why it was tuned to a channel which only seemed to be showing political talk shows I have no idea especially when it seemed to feature the narrow and parochial politics of Wales and then talking heads parroting the same acceptable views over and over as though nobody had an actual view but were repeating other things that someone else in the media found acceptable to say – one of them made sure that he prefaced his views with the typical non words statement of ‘i’m not racist or fascist and not sexist but…..well you can probably tell what kind of frame of mind I was in !.
So anyway…..the actual thing that provoked this post was one of the talking heads endlessly talking about the middle class vote and in the next sentence talking about the…..yes you guessed it : the working class vote. as those weak terms meant anything – but maybe that’s how the minds of political pundits work. Maybe that is in itself an oxymoron but I went home (eventually) had a couple of hours sleep before driving home and I was still thinking about it as I drove back to the hospital as soon as it was light and I was no longer stupid tired.
There was once a time when I pretty well knew where a post was going when I started writing ; nowadays i’m not so sure as most of the time i’m not writing about boats, the building and sailing of them or the medium that they mostly float in. Today things are different ; I use the blog to explore the things that i’m thinking about and it’s often the case that writing about one thing makes me see and think about other things that are only related in my mind. Thus it is that in a recent blog post in which I was mainly talking about the choices I face in deciding how to best live this stage of my life I found myself talking about class in relation to somewhere I was visiting on holiday – in fact making a weak comparison between two places near to each other but very different in character.
In that post I made the mistake of describing one place as very middle class and the other very not middle class. I thought that I knew what I meant but that I couldn’t easily say why I thought it was the case or even what I meant by calling a place middle class (or not) so I decided to bring that problem here and think about.
My starting point, as is nearly always the case, is the world of boats, the sea and sadly their bastard offspring – leisure sailing and yachting. In fact my starting point is really the life and times of one time writer, magazine editor and yacht designer the late Maurice Griffiths Esq. In one of his earliest books he wrote for and about the new middle class in the sport of leisure sailing and yachting only he termed the new boat owning middle class as the middling sort – not grand enough to be the aristocracy of grand yacht owners replete with a paid captain and crew and not the working/crew class of competent crewmen largely derived from the tough world of fishing under sail in the North sea in winter : many fishermen ran fishing smacks in the winter and then crewed the big racing yachts during the summer to make some hard cash.
Running with the theme of class and yachting, then yachting, as opposed to mere sailing, is a very middle class thing as is one of it’s worst features which is yacht clubs and yacht racing. I hang my head in shame to say that I was once a yacht club member – my membership didn’t last very long as one of the first things I discovered about myself during my offshore yacht racing career was how uncomfortable I was whenever we had to visit certain yacht clubs ; even the boat’s owner could sense that and I agreed.
The problem, or at least my problem, was that many yacht clubs used to exclude women and dogs – and later I found out even working seamen and professional sailors. At the time if first happened I was already deep into my SRN training, the rule of ‘no women allowed in the bar’ was considerably relaxed but the braying middle class, and very male middle class, attitudes were still very much present. I’m glad today that many of the more egregiously offending yacht clubs have had to close their doors since that time – good riddance I say.
If you really want to understand, or even merely observe the middle class doing it’s middle class thing then go and watch a yacht club rules or protest committee. Many club level racing yachtsmen love their rules and love arguing about other sailors rules infractions at protest hearings. It’s not just yacht clubs either : a friend who like nothing more than to whack his balls around a golf course says it’s much the same with a certain type of middle class golfer.
Continuing with the theme of class and yachting for a moment you might be saying ‘hang on a moment fella – didn’t you recently claim that Weymouth isn’t a middle class town yet it has a marina – and aren’t yachts and marinas good evidence of middle classness !. Well yes it has, but so has the nearby town of Poole which not only has several marinas but a high end, or at least expensive, builder of ostentatious motor yachts. Poole was voted as one of Dorset’s Turd Towns in the Youtube channel of the same name and while disliking that channel intensely I agree with it’s producer when it comes to Poole. Poole high street is a sad place today ; the last time we visited the bookshop had gone as had the branch of M&S and i’m told that they moved out due to the shoplifting. The town does still have a Coffee 1 and the most excellent Forcandles store going so not all is lost but it’s a rough place now.
Weymouth, Poole and several other towns that I could mention do have marinas and yet the marinas have very little to do with the town that gives them space. Take a look at Weymouth as an example and for sure you will see expensive yachts and even more expensive motor boats but you’ll also notice the locked gates and the surrounding fence. I doubt that many boats are owned by local sailors, instead most marinas have car parks stuffed full of expensive German saloon cars of a summers day and all of them will have driven in from somewhere else. What boats are alongside the town quays or on moorings might well have local owners but the ones in Weymouth reflect their owners businesses which mostly revolve around sea fishing charters – you could easily claim that sea fishing off somebody else’s boat is very much a working class pursuit.
I know that I only used middle class as a defining characteristic of place but then I find that easier to define than working class and that’s weird because I always regarded myself as a working class man in a mainly female middle class occupation – please note that I don’t grace the occupation of nursing with the title profession as today it seems anything but professional. If you’re wondering how any nurse could call themselves working class well that’s how it panned out in one of the few academic studies in nursing that looked at men’s vs women’s attitudes to the job. Many other men of my age defined themselves as working class on the basis that their training, like mine, was an apprenticeship rather than a university degree course while many women that answered that study defined themselves (and the job) as middle class – a lot of that being about perceived status.
Today I rather ram my tongue hard into my cheek when I talk about class ; just as I do with gender. I can almost hear the outrage of some status obsessed professional nurses today when I talk about either facet of life. If they could i’m sure that they would cancel me but 1 – I don’t care and 2 none of them read this blog. When I say that class is a bit like gender what I mean is that you call yourself any gender that you choose but it doesn’t mean a thing, neither does class.
But how do we define the middle class or what a middle class person is like ?. I begin to see that I can’t, at least not quickly or easily so, once again, I go back to what the late Maurice Griffiths said about the middling sort back in the 1920’s and 30’s. As I remember it Griffiths was referring to the new middle class comprising of doctors, lawyers and accountants although today we could perhaps name several professions and occupations that also seem to characterize what we think of today as middle class jobs. Today I would always add the civil service, teachers and almost anyone in a useless office job – but lets talk about one job that often gets mentioned and that’s nursing of course.
In dictionary definitions nurses and nursing often get mentioned as middle class and that’s something I find very strange because nursing used to be low class women’s work and it’s usual uniform seemed to owe more to domestic service than middle class gentlemen doctors ; notably physicians. The one actual reference I was going to use here still sat as a file on my desktop until my computer lost it’s memory marbles one day. The study was one in which most female (nurse) responses regarded themselves and their work as middle class while the much fewer male nurse responses was that they saw themselves as working class.
That’s largely how I see myself as I trained at a time when student nurses were treated as part of the workforce and the training was more like an apprenticeship : today it’s almost universally a college degree course and the weird thing about that was that it was argued – in my mind very strongly argued – by some nurses that it was needed to increase their perceived status and sense of professionalism. I always found that a strange thing but status is often mentioned in any dictionary definition and the desire for higher status in nursing today is a real thing ; almost what Nietzsche called a will to power.
The more consistent definitions I found tend to refer back to single sources but all of them say that being middle class means not being wealthy and not being poor ; while those themselves are weak social definitions I can quickly understand what poor means as what it seems to come down to is not having a discretionary income after the household bills have only taken care of the essential costs of accommodation, food and local taxation. It also means that being poor in terms of income means little or no choice about where to live and how to live. The definition becomes more clear when it comes to health ; one area in the local city is regarded as a middle class area and the one next to it as poor or lower socio-economic class and the difference in health years is startling – locally it was given as a 17 year difference in health years and overall longevity.
The Marxists always define middle class, or any form of class, in terms of oppressor and oppressed – thus the middle class are seen as oppressing the lower class while being oppressed themselves by those of a higher status of middle class power or the wealth and powerful upper class. It’s here that I want to branch out – away from dictionary definitions – and talk about my rather odd views about the levels of middle classness, discretionary income (and use of time), feminism and overall middle class weirdness.
One feature of middle class status and aspiration is it’s explicit goal of achieving tertiary (degree level) education. One of the major downsides to that is that those who go to university don’t always get a useful degree or even a good education but do become indoctrinated by the liberal elite in the guise of university lecturers and whatever fuckwittery they are promoting at the time. Another part of this is that not all degrees are valid or useful which is why society gets a whole load of indoctrinated and unemployable young adults with huge amounts of entitlement and narcissism. Those that do get a useful degree – my example would be doctors and nurses – do so but only at the cost of huge student debt.
I have to admit that when it comes to Nurses and Nursing as a profession I do rather experience a degree of impostor syndrome – no pun intended about my use of degree as I don’t have one (and never will). My experience is that i’m basically a working class kind of guy doing a middle class job : it might be fair to say that i’m in fact deeply middle class as my job is secure and I fall into the not poor and definitely not wealthy classification. Where it breaks down ever so slightly is that I don’t value tertiary (degree level) education for nurses as I see it as unnecessary and think that what we need is a better form of apprenticeship and not the ability to write convoluted academic essays.
Furthermore I would add that iv’e seen, time and time again, that those nurses (women mainly) that have a desire for more and more status are usually the less competent when it comes to the actual job of nursing and a whole lot more pushy and aggressive to those whom they regard as their subordinates or minions. If you want to experience Karens in action then go and be a low status HCA or staff nurse – and more notably a male version of either – and you will get an immediate sense of how your status is perceived by Sister Karen, Matron karen or anywhere above that on the greasy pole of nursing management.
A regular reader or visitor here will know that I usually start my posts by going for a walk around the lanes and seeing what my brain comes up with that day. Then, when I start the actual writing, what I often do is give the new post a title which attempts to say in one word or one phrase what i’m thinking about. Nowadays I regularly have to change the title as my posts take a lot longer to write and have had several thinking sessions and many additions before the post finally goes up on the finishing rack for editing ; often now a post doesn’t make it past the editing and goes straight to the recycle bin.
Originally I was going to title this post Anodyne as that was my original one word description of most of the English middle class – especially it’s politicians – to day though I would describe them as faceless party apparatchiks and not at all individual. My eventual title for this post in a simple phrase would have been Just Be Nice as that one phrase seems to sum up much of middle class thinking about nearly anything – and just as meaningless. This is where I go out on a limb as what i’m about to say is merely personal opinion.
Were I to define many of the middle class in terms of computer games I would define them as NPC’s (non player characters) as there is such a predictable and uniform sameness about many of them. A well known derogatory term in English vernacular speech would also cover them : NIMBY’s or Not In my back yard as that sums up the usual NPC response to anything from illegal immigrants being dumped there, Irish Travelers turning up and parking their caravans in the field behind their exclusively des res housing estate and even the building of new social housing on the field that the travelers have been evicted from…..again.
Were I instead to consider the middle classes in terms of religion, notably Christians I would use the term Lukewarm as with a well known verse from Revelation : “I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.”
And where it ended up…
When I started work on this post I tried to define the middling sort in my own terms of jobs, income, attitudes, political and religious beliefs. sports, hobbies and typical interests. I failed of course and ended up searching the dictionary first and then turning to the internet for cheap inspiration. One of the very first things I came across that was given as a description of the middle classes was that of usually secure jobs that came with discretionary income – thus not life in the survival mode of the poor or having real wealth and property like the genuinely upper classes have. I would add to the feature of discretionary income the similar concept of discretionary time or free leisure time to pursue something other than enough cash to pay for housing, food and utilities.
Where it ended up was with me taking a long and associative wander through every cliche about class I could think up and getting very frustrated with the whole post such that I almost deleted it several times. Unlike the Tv talk show political pundits for whom the idea of middle class vote seemed to be little more than an assumed code for those with acceptable views – in other words although the unspoken ones – people like us.
Anyway…at some point I gave up and Jackie sent me home although my over tired mind was still chewing on the idea.
Best wishes to Y’awl
Afterword/afterthoughts. As you can well imagine there were various versions and attempts at this post and many of those attempts wandered off into something like class resentment crossed with conspiracy theory ; so I dumped most of it and edited what remained into something with a lot less rant mode built in. Having started with the simple framework of a simple notion of the late Maurice Griffiths – that of detailing what the young chap should sail back in the 1920’s – I went off in my own direction which was to wonder what the new middle class had already become and where it was going.
One way my mind went on that and quite quickly is that this idea of a new middle class wasn’t and couldn’t have been merely a male phenomenon and in fact it was Mrs Griffiths the first (Dulcie Kennard) that provided the initial inspiration. That women were moving into male dominated professions and taking up previously male interests is something that I got from her own history ; that she may have created the first sailing school, or academy, for other women. One step further down that route and I of course came to the suffragettes and female emancipation ; my problem, at least for this post, is that it didn’t end there.
There are claims that the suffragette movement was partially dominated by working class women and I for one have always found that hard to believe. The choices of work, or occupation, for women was then very narrow with many working women being in service or maybe being low end factory workers while trying to also bring up children : the other choice was always prostitution but whatever choice it was the lives of working women certainly didn’t have the middle class luxuries of spare income and free time. My conclusion even then was that the suffragette movement was a very middle class thing and a direct precursor of feminism with everything that that implies.
Whilst lauded by some it’s also said that feminism hasn’t been of great service to women themselves nor has the actual influence of women in the professions and in society as it is some hundred years down the line. That’s the point where my thoughts definitely went down the route of anti feminism and the rise of women in the workplace where they are just as disagreeable, competitive and bullying as their worst male counterparts…..ask me – i’m a nurse after all and iv’e seen the scum rise to the surface with both men and women and it’s not a pretty sight.
Probably best if I stop now before I start ranting eh ?
