What’s classy if you are rich and trashy if you are poor? Drinking during the day — totally classy if you are indulging in a post-lunch session at an upmarket restaurant, pretty trashy if you are spending all afternoon outside the local boozer, putting away half pints. How about hard drugs? Grotty and criminal if you live on a council estate, but devil-may-care cool if you are a hollow-cheeked baronet with a fancy pad bought for you by your dad. Ditto speaking two languages, tax avoidance, hooking up with your cousin, having children with multiple partners, not working…
These, at least, are just some of the suggestions offered by the various ‘classy/trashy’ listicle memes that have periodically surfaced on social media ever since the New Zealand columnist Ana Samways sought advice on the subject from Twitter in 2016. One conclusion might be that the rich and the poor are unexpectedly similar, at least when it comes to their preferred pursuits (indiscriminate shagging, boozing, lazing about), the only difference being how these indulgences are regarded by society.
There will of course be local variations to this. I’m no expert on the codes that dictate class (or lack thereof) in the smarter post-codes of Wellington, NZ, but the idea does echo a concept long familiar in the British media, that the upper classes and the lower classes have a good deal common when it comes to knowing how to have a good time, largely because they aren’t hobbled by the guilt and social ambition that besets the middle classes, for whom fun is never the point.
I’ve even witnessed this trope in real life, in my very own sitting room. My father was a working-class boy from Bromley who left school at 14 to take up a hairdressing apprenticeship at a Mayfair salon. He was good looking and good with an up-do. He rose fast, and always said that being hairdresser meant that he could get on with anyone “from a dustman to a duke”; but it wasn’t the dustmen who turned him on to drugs in the 1970s, it was the posh kids he met at clubs like Sybilla’s and the Aretusa.
Dad started taking heroin, and then he started selling it. To aristocrats. By the time he was in his mid-thirties and I was not yet ten the hairdressing wasn’t going so well (junkies and day-jobs don’t mix) so the dealing was paying the bills. Which meant every night Chelsea’s loucher denizens would find their way across the river to our mansion flat in Battersea to buy drugs, while I performed ancillary services like refilling wineglasses and so on. The denizens usually couldn’t be bothered to go back home to sample their purchases, so stayed at ours, sometimes all night. I would often find a stoned marquess passed out on the carpet when I got up for my morning Rice Krispies (scooped direct from the packet into my mouth).
They seemed to have so much in common, my dad and these men who had been educated at Eton and would one day inherit castles. They dressed the same, liked the same music, could stay up all night chatting. We were even invited to Jamie Blandford’s wedding at Blenheim Castle. So classy! (For us at least, probably quite trashy that the future Duke of Marlborough invited his dealer, and his dealer’s daughter, to his wedding).
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe