“So – what class are you? I can never decide. I think I’m middle-middle class now, because of my job and my accent, but I feel like it’s a very tenuous hold.

I still say ‘toilet’ instead of ‘loo’, I’ve never been to the opera, ballet or skiing. I like reading but am bored to tears by the theatre. Some of my extended family are lawyers and the like, others are on benefits. I went to a state school but Cambridge University. I was brought up in a manky part of south-east London, but not the mankiest. My parents prized education but didn’t get involved in my homework or fill my spare hours with tutors, dance classes or any of the other things with which, I discovered when I got to university, other people had been filling their leisure hours. I’m better off than my parents, but we were perfectly comfortable when I was growing up. Then again, it was a comfort that came from careful saving and apportionment – my parents worried about money and I still do – not because we knew, as truly middle class people do, that there just IS money, sloshing about it the background, ready to be tapped whenever the need – or rather, urge – presents itself.

Lucy Mangan on the class divide