MEanderings

Despite being born to a mother who once ran around a street where none of the children had any shoes, I suppose I am what people would call middle class. I have never got the hang of it, though admittedly I haven’t ever put in much effort. The lower sort are easy and you don’t actually have to do much at all as long as there is a degree of respectability attached to your situation in life; respectability and a sort of predictability, something measurable in terms of the kind of things one would expect to possess and have achieved en route from birth to grave, these forming the basis of a collective lower middle way of existence – the shared experience, if one can call it that.

Upper middle is essentially the same, but the houses are bigger, the stakes higher and there is usually more money, inherited or earned, often both. There are circles of friends. Not just friends, but circles of them, and to have a wide circle of friends is something to be aspired to. These friends, one assumes, are in some way linked, connected. Or there is a connection. Would the checkout worker living in a council flat with her asbo kids be part of that circle? Unlikely, though she is by no means disallowed. But she doesn’t count in the same way as the wide Circle does.

There is, or should be, a network which you are part of, with which you actively engage. Networking is something you need to be good at doing. If you are not, you should have the knack of being popular because then you will most likely be in the right place at the right time.

I think it is too late for me, I will never get the hang of it. In any case, I’m much the same as I used to be in the playground. The good girls were too good for me, the bright ones were too clever and I was not adventurous enough to go with the bad ones. So I hopped around on the margins – much as I do now - and mostly (but not exclusively) hang out with other marginalistes, as well as bouncing the ball around on my own, which doesn't look like fun but is. Especially if you are no good at games.

I am still supposed to be in the wardrobe but I have not been well. Nothing new there obviously, but what I mean is I have not been well enough to write very much, or at least not the thing I was hoping would grow into a novel. I was emailed by someone who asked if I would like to be a featured M.E. (CFS) blogger on a site that focuses on health matters. Although it was nice that someone approached me because he liked my writing, my heart sinks a little at the thought of being so firmly identified with my Condition. I wondered whether to change my profile, but I’m not going to do that. Happy to note, though, that the label Writing tops the M.E. one. Just.