What does middle class mean to you?

Margaret - I don't understand what you mean about NZ. My daughter has friends from all walks of life and many different nationalities, including American and Asia. I know the Maoris have problems in housing and employment which may account for drug use.
I am surprised that anyone not from Sheffield can identify different areas.

The near relations that I know who live in NZ live in a reservation for white European Stock people. I find that disgusting and typical of a country that pretends it has no class sytem. Germany's class system is there but only in the background. Housing is often very mixed up and school children of all classes sit all together in the class room.
It can't be helped that people of similar backgrounds group together. When I tell people in the UK I come originally from Sheffield then they always ask me where in Sheffield - to place me. Middle class or working class?
This has never happened in Germany.

Victorian Board School circa 1860. No drawing room but classroom one, classroom two, library etc. It is split into two so we use the 'Girls's Entrance'. We downsized to this and I'm never moving either! We have enormous roof supports in the bedrooms that can catch us out even after 20 years.

I love it, it's 4 bedroomed with views cross the Bristol Channel to Wales

It's far to big for me but I can't bear to move!!

Sounds lovely jeni. I now live in a four-bedroom, extended two-up-two down northern terrace; we downsized in 2010. I would guess it dates for about 1880, but, interestingly, it has been owned, from the very first and often since, by a woman rather than man. It still is.

Mine about. 1805.
Very. Chequered past.firstly probably a stables and coach house, then. Farm, lastly. Divided into 3 houses of which I have the middle one! Very tall ceilings. Downstairs, quoins. Which you can hit your head on upstairs!

New Zealand seems to be genuinely classless - at least amongst people of European descent - but there is a big racial divide.

Nonu Mine was early Victorian, so probably close to overlapping. But I have spent ages training myself not to say drawing room – even Mr Absent and absentdaughter taker the p when I do. Sorry, it slipped out – as the bishop…

I do have a Victorian house - albeit a former miner's cottage

However , our house is Georgian ,

I also have a drawing room , absent , how remarkable

And then you're demoted when you've spent it all?

And if you win the lottery (in a big way) does that automatically move you up a class?

So are people with incomes beyond 50.000 deemed as middle class ? Interesting !

But how does this tell you anything abput their class? My DD is a surgeon and has frequently been asked by consultants which school she attended, in spite of going to Oxford. Being female has been a greater sin though than attending a state comprehensive.

Really? so many medical staff at all levels are from other countries, how does it work? My GP is Eurasian, used to be Indian, my eye surgeon is South African and the nephrologist who treated DH a Zimbabwean of Indian origin.

Unfortunately,Flickety I can assure you that in some professions, especially medicine, the question of class and social background is eluded to, both openly and succinctly.

You can buy stuff for removing artex. In our London house we had the most remarkable, huge ceiling rose that I have ever seen in a Victorian – excuse me – middle class house. I have an interest in architecture and interior design but I have never seen this particular design in a house or in an artisan's design book and it was one of the reasons why I bought the house in the first place. However, the previous owner had painted it (and the rest of the ceiling) with white artex. Moreover, it looked like he's used a yard broom to do it.

The large flat bit of the ceiling was replastered over the artex but Mr absent and I spent many hours brushing on this artex remover and scraping the artex off. As we got to more intricate bits of the design, we used finer and finer instruments – right down to the point of a pin – to remove the artex. In the process we uncovered the whole history of the house, right down to the original pink distemper. We stripped it completely and uncovered all sorts of details in the design that we had not been able to see before. It was such hard, neck-twisting work but so satisfying.

The drawing room was eventually painted a very pale violet with the cornice and ceiling rose picked out in a slightly darker shade of the same colour. It looked stunning.

Who looks at ceilings anyway?

It means absolutely nothing. It is generally used as a slipshod way of referring to people on the middle band of incomes, say £30,000 to £50,000. It includes people of both sexes, all ages, all or no level of education and with every interest and none at all.

DH and I come from entirely different backgrounds, incomes and childhood experiences but we, and our families were joined together by a similarity of attitudes and views, our parents were good friends, although they had different incomes, occupations and life style. Throughout our lives nobody at any time has ever asked either DH or me about our backgrounds in a way that would decide whether we did or did not get a job, join a social organisation or make a social contact. Our friendships are based on shared interests, not on some accident of our friends birth. I discovered quite recently that I was quite mistaken in what I thought I knew about a long-time friends childhood background. As it was irrelevant to our friendship it had never really arisen as a topic of conversation.

I have yet to meet a country that didn't have a hierarchical social system. In this country the idea of class structure, however much it may have existed in the past is now a construct of the media and political classes. I have yet to meet anybody who talked or took any notice of it in normal life.

My house has Artex ceilings. I thought about having them skimmed but always had other priorities. Then I reflected that they might come back into fashion...please!

I remember aspiring to have artex ceilings in the late 70s! When we had an extension built, we factored the cost of an artex ceiling into the project. The people who bought our house must have cursed us years later - it's a swine to scrape off!

You can get away with anything now in decor - I was watching a programme yesterday about house selling and the house had one wall done in Artex over polystyrene. It was hideous, but a young couple looked at it and said it was 'so retro'. It had actually been like that for thirty years. Daft b*uggers.

Baubles - I loved that series - Stanley Baxter at his best, and that's saying something. He's one of the greatest of Scottish entertainers. Still alive, but retired.

Oh, thank goodness for that Sel