Unless you fully appreciate this peculiar mindset and its implications you will never truly understand the English. Try repeating the above mantras to yourself every day for about twenty years, and you'll get the idea. Recite them in a resignedly cheerful tone, adding the odd 'mustn't grumble' or 'never mind' or 'better make the best of it', and you will be well on your way to becoming English. Learn to greet every problem, from a piece of burnt toast to World War Three, with 'Typical!', somehow managing to sound simultaneously peeved, stoical and smugly omniscient, and you will qualify as a fully acculturated English person.
CULINARY CLASS CODES
Along with the lists of ingredients and calorie-counts, almost every item of English food comes with an invisible class label. (Warning: this product may contain traces of lower-middle-class substances. Warning: this product has petit-bourgeois associations and may not be suitable for upper-middle-class dinner parties.) Socially, you are what you eat - and when, where and in what manner you eat it, and what you call it, and how you talk about it.
The popular novelist Jilly Cooper, who has a much better understanding of the English class system than any sociologist, quotes a shopkeeper who told her, 'When a woman asks for back I call her "madam"; when she asks for streaky I call her "dear".' Nowadays, in addition to these two different cuts of bacon, one would have to take into account the class semiotics of extra-lean and organic bacon, lardons, prosciutto, speck and Serrano ham (all favoured by the 'madam' class rather than the 'dear', but more specifically by the educated-upper-middle branch of the 'madam' class), as well as 'bacon bits', pork scratchings, and bacon-flavoured crisps (all decidedly 'dear'-class foods, rarely eaten by 'madams').
English people of all classes love bacon sandwiches (the northern working classes call them 'bacon butties'), although some more pretentious members of the lower- and middle-middle classes pretend to have daintier, more refined tastes, and some affectedly health-conscious upper-middles make disapproving noises about fat, salt, cholesterol and heart disease.
Other foods that come with invisible labels warning of lower-class associations include:
* prawn cocktail (the prawns are fine, but the pink 'cocktail' sauce is lower-middle class - and, incidentally, it does not suddenly become any 'posher' if you call it 'Marie-Rose' sauce)
* egg and chips (both ingredients are relatively classless on their own, but working class if eaten together)
* pasta salad (nothing wrong with pasta per se, but it's 'common' if you serve it cold and mixed with mayonnaise)
* rice salad (lower class in any shape or form, but particularly with sweetcorn in it)
* tinned fruit (in syrup it's working class, in fruit juice it's still only about lower-middle)
* sliced hard-boiled eggs and/or sliced tomato in a green salad (whole cherry tomatoes are just about OK, but the class-anxious would be advised generally to keep tomatoes, eggs and lettuce away from each other)
* tinned fish (all right as an ingredient in something else, such as fishcakes, but very working class if served on its own)
* chip butties (a mainly northern tradition; even if you call it a chip sandwich rather than a butty, it is about as working-class as food can get).
Very secure uppers and upper-middles, with the right accents and other accoutrements, can admit to loving any or all of these foods with impunity - they will merely be regarded as charmingly eccentric. The more class-anxious should take care to pick their charming eccentricity from the very bottom of the scale (chip butties) rather than the class nearest to them (tinned fruit in juice), to avoid any possibility of a misunderstanding.
The Health-correctness Indicator
Since about the mid-1980s, health-correctness has become the main gastronomic class-divider. As a general rule, the middle social ranks are highly susceptible to the latest healthy-eating fads and fashions, while the highest and lowest classes are more robust in their views and secure in their food preferences, and apparently largely immune to the blandishments and exhortations of the middle-class health police.
Food, we are told, is the new sex. It is certainly true that food has taken over from sex as the principal concern of what I call the 'interfering classes' - the nannyish, middle-class busybodies who have appointed themselves guardians of the nation's culinary morals, and who are currently obsessed with making the working class eat up its vegetables. We no longer have the prudish Mary Whitehouse complaining about sex and 'bad language' on television; instead, we have armies of middle-class amateur nutritionists and dieticians complaining about all the seductive advertisements for junk food, which are supposedly corrupting the nation's youth. By which they mean working-class youth: everyone knows that it's the Kevins and Traceys who are stuffing their faces with fatty and sugary snack foods, not the Jamies and Saskias.
Particularly not the upper-middle Saskias, many of whom are anaemic born-again vegetarians, or borderline anorexic or bulimic, or suffer from imaginary gluten and lactose 'intolerances'. None of this seems to worry the health-correctness evangelists, who are only interested in force-feeding Kevin and Tracey their five daily portions of fruit and vegetables, and confiscating their crisps.
The upper-middle chattering classes are the most receptive and suggestible adherents of the health-correctness cults. Among the females of this class in particular, food taboos have become the primary means of defining one's social identity. You are what you do not eat. No chattering-class dinner party can take place without a careful advance survey of all the guests' fashionable food allergies, intolerances and ideological positions. 'I've stopped giving dinner parties,' one upper-middle-class journalist told me. 'It's become simply impossible. Catering for the odd vegetarian was OK, but now everyone's got a wheat allergy or a dairy intolerance or they're vegan or macrobiotic or Atkins or they can't eat eggs or they've got 'issues' about salt or they're paranoid about e-numbers or they'll only eat organic or they're de-toxing...'
While I have every sympathy for anyone with a genuine food allergy, the fact is that only a very small percentage of the population actually have such identifiable medical conditions - far fewer than the number who believe they are afflicted. These English chattering-class females seem to hope that, like the Princess and the Pea, their extreme sensitivities about food will somehow demonstrate that they are exquisitely sensitive, highly tuned, finely bred people, not like the vulgar hoi-polloi who can eat anything. In these rarefied circles, you are looked down upon if you have no difficulty digesting proletarian substances such as bread and milk.
If you really cannot manage to have any modish food problems yourself, then make sure that your children have some, or at least fret noisily about the possibility that they might be allergic to something: 'Ooh, no! Don't give Tamara an apricot! She hasn't been tested for apricots yet. She had a bit of a reaction to strawberries, so we can't be too careful.' 'Katie can't have bottled baby food - too much sodium, so I buy organic vegetables and puree them myself...' Even if your children are unfashionably robust, you must take the trouble to keep up with the latest food-fear trends: you should know that carbohydrates are the new fat (like brown is the new black) and homocysteine is the new cholesterol; the F-Plan diet is out, Atkins is in; and on the genetic-modification debate, the official chattering-class party line is 'two genes good, four genes bad'. As a rule of thumb, assume that there is no such thing as a 'safe' food, except possibly an organic carrot personally hand-reared by Prince Charles.