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Birthday Lunch :)


NormanH
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[quote user="sweet 17"]

[quote user="Rabbie"]Thanks for posting this Sweet17. The poem came to mind while reading the thread and then I saw your link.  I rember reading it in a small book called Noblesse Oblige which had the poem, the famous essay U and Non-U by Nancy Mitford and IIRC another essay by Alan Ross whose subject matter escapes me. Still the book was published nearly 60 years ago and was a bit of a snob's charter.[/quote]

Well, Rabbie, I thought of you when I saw this://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2235856/Shallots-rye-bread-Illy-coffee-Belvedere-vodka-Middle-Class-Handbook-blog-gives-advice.html

It seems that there are no more upper class people any more and that the best any of us can hope for is to be middle class [:P]

As a matter of fact, apart from shallots, I don't buy anything else on thecoffe. list.  Also, I don't agree that rye bread tastes nasty.  It's delicious but you have to buy it fresh from a good baker and not in the supermarket.

Me, I know my place as little Ronnie says in that famous sketch with big Ronnie and John Cleese [:)]

[/quote]I have always thought of myself as middle class but I may need to review this after reading the article[:)].

 I never buy vodka - Belvedere or otherwise, bottled water or Illy coffee. My onions and shallots I grow in my own garden and we bake our own bread sometimes using rye flour in the mixture. I would never be so pretentious to buy something unless I liked it just for appearances sake.

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Rabbie, I don't think I genuinely know how I would class myself.

I used to say "working class" but I can't, strictly speaking, say that anymore as I am retired and no longer working!

It's the same with my dog; on her certificate, it says "working cocker" but, to my absolute knowledge, she's never done a day's work in her life!

Incidently, the dog is the only one in our house with a pedigree as both OH and I consider ourselves mongrels.  And even the dog is not one of our choosing; we just ended up with her because her original owners rejected her and she had nowhere to go.

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I think class in the UK is mainly a matter of culture and upbringing rather than economic status.

However I do tend to think that chateau owners must belong to a high social class[:D]

And wasn't it Oscar Wilde who described "work as the curse of the drinking classes". I do find the english obsession with class rather amusing - just a way of putting people into categories to save yourself the bother of getting to know them

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[quote user="Rabbie"]

I think class in the UK is mainly a matter of culture and upbringing rather than economic status.

However I do tend to think that chateau owners must belong to a high social class[:D]

And wasn't it Oscar Wilde who described "work as the curse of the drinking classes". I do find the english obsession with class rather amusing - just a way of putting people into categories to save yourself the bother of getting to know them

[/quote]

Why just the English? I have found as much in scotland as anywhere.[:P]

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[quote user="NickP"][quote user="Rabbie"]

I think class in the UK is mainly a matter of culture and upbringing rather than economic status.

However I do tend to think that chateau owners must belong to a high social class[:D]

And wasn't it Oscar Wilde who described "work as the curse of the drinking classes". I do find the english obsession with class rather amusing - just a way of putting people into categories to save yourself the bother of getting to know them

[/quote]

Why just the English? I have found as much in scotland as anywhere.[:P]

[/quote]I just speak as I find.  Not been much in Scotland these last 30 years but I have never encountered the class consciousness I have down south.

Our primary school in Scotland boasted a complete cross-section of the local community from the lairds children to those whose parents were permanently unemployed.

 

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Well rabbie,  I have spent a lot of time working in scotland in the past years, and I found as much class consciousness as I have ever noticed in the south of England. I think you will find that we see what we want to or what our prejudice want to see.
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Not sure how we got here from "Happy Birthday Norman", but I have known some incredibly class-conscious French people.

If you absent-mindedly move in for that third and fourth kiss (so prevalent among most of my Vendee friends) on greeting them, they will hold you away at arm's length so you can't make it to their cheek for number 3.

And when I took some middle-class French friends to one of the Vendee's beaches (admittedly a slightly Blackpoolish one) they made very audible comments about the lower orders that I found quite shocking.

Angela
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[quote user="Loiseau"]Not sure how we got here from "Happy Birthday Norman", but I have known some incredibly class-conscious French people.

If you absent-mindedly move in for that third and fourth kiss (so prevalent among most of my Vendee friends) on greeting them, they will hold you away at arm's length so you can't make it to their cheek for number 3.

And when I took some middle-class French friends to one of the Vendee's beaches (admittedly a slightly Blackpoolish one) they made very audible comments about the lower orders that I found quite shocking.

Angela[/quote]

I rarely meet anything to do with class in England, although one neighbour spoke about another with 4 very noisy children, saying the mother should have been in a council house! Our area is all private houses - and I think her only objection was that the children get out of control and the mother shouts at them. I thought it all hilarious, and we occasionally refer to the woman as 'the council house woman' (she lives further along the road and I've rarely seen the family); we both grew up in council houses, and to us it wasn't derogatory, just plain daft!

In France, the kiss business has me bothered at the moment. It's three around here, although one of my closest friends (French) refuses to take part in it all, as she says she's 'international', although I noticed recently that she's made a new friend (Spanish - she never makes French friends, as she thinks the French are awful!), who she thinks is wonderful, and puts up with 3 kisses from her!

On Saturday, an elderly Spanish woman who rents an apartment in our block, and whose French is terrible to understand, ran across the road and gave me 3 kisses! Totally shocked by it - and then I was even less able to concentrate on what she was telling me about! I usually have to guess that it's about her next door neighbour (English, and who rarely visits) or her sister. I thought I was safe last week, as I told everyone I met and am on Kissing terms with that I wasn't doing any because I was still choking after my awful bronchitis, but she got under my defences!

I can never work out when or why it's time to start the whole thing with people anyway - not that I've ever instigated it. Most people at AVF just do it almost from the start, which really adds a huge amount of time to everything; if there are 40 on a walk it takes forever! Tonight there will probably be around 80 at a soirée - eek! Glad they don't do that in England!

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