What does middle class mean to you?

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.

Who looks at ceilings anyway?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I also have a drawing room , absent , how remarkable

However , our house is Georgian ,

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

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…

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

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!

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.

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!!

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.

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.

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.

McLaren buggies, and having children with names like Rollo and Lottie. (not really, I just made that up to enter the competition).

I have never heard of anything of the kind in NZ. A great many of the younger generation are of mixed blood and even more of their children are. It may soon be very hard to find people of 'white European Stock' there.

Being middle class to me means being well spoken, well mannered and well dressed...

Hmmn.
When I first came here in 1972 I made some private observations. At that time I thought there seems to be a working class , an upper class, both having fun, and a middle class propping up both..
That still seems to be the case for me.
There are endless immigrants who need support, 75% of land in this country is still in private hands....
Although I am not a sociologist, it is just a thought.

Margaret, your German English comparison on class matters reminded me of the Ford Motor manufacturers back in the 70s. It was owned by a German company then, and there was a great deal of industrial unrest in the English one, and very little in the German one, which had similar pay and conditions. The execs came over to the English branch to see what was going wrong.

They concluded that the problem in the English one, was that the executives lived in a different area from the workers, spoke a different version of English and sent their children to different schools, and this was the basis and cause of the deep mistrust leading to industrial unrest.

This was a classic case of class divisions causing unnecessary problems.

Johanna Karl Marx had no time for lazy people who did not work. He lumped the idle rich and the idle poor together in his condemnation! (Of course, not all rich are idle, and not all poor are idle by any means, but some are)