I'm not sure if I really understand how it all works in Canada yet but I always thought that the American class system was based purely on wealth whereas the British class system was entirely to do with Heritage and had little to do with money. When I was young I once dated a girl who's family were by all accounts "upper class". All their friends had titles of one kind or another and everyone had been to expensive public schools. Her family were farmers and not wealthy ones at that. Even though they put her through public school it must have nearly bankrupted them. But they very much lived the upper-class lifestyle, going shooting and having black-tie dinner parties at weekends. But I very much doubt they would have been upper-class according to the American perspective.

Not quite, history also comes into it, consider the DAR or, in the south, the Daughters of the Confederacy. The ability to trace one's ancestry to the Mayflower provides a considerable measure of social status, at least in the east.

I think there are as many different definitions of social class in the UK as there are newspaper editors with a spurious point to make or a rag to sell. There's a brilliant, somewhat tongue-in-cheek discussion of the English class system in a book by the social anthropoligist Kate Fox, called "Watching the English." Her basic premise is this: the upper and lower social classes are secure in their status, and all the angst and worry over which class you and your neighbours are in stems from insecurities in the middle classes and, particularly, those on the boundary between one social class and another.

Class, she reckons, is illustrated effectively by your attitudes towards other people, possessions, cars, houses, money (attitudes towards, not possession of - an important distinction... you can be upper-class but poor, or fabulously wealthy but resolutely working class). Fox makes a study of behaviour towards cars as one example of this. People who drive beaten-up bangers full of chocolate wrappers and bits of old string tend to be either working class or upper/upper-middle (the true upper classes, of course, might drive themselves occasionally but have a man to clean the car). Polishing the car on the street every Sunday morning is a defining factor of the upper-working or lower-middle boundary; running it through a carwash every few weeks is characteristic of the middle-middle/upper-middle grouping.

I don't know how, or whether, this relates to Canada. If it does, then my street echoes others' comments here about the juxtaposition of social classes in residential neighbourhoods - we have religious car-polishers, sweet-wrapper-filled mud-caked bangers (and newer models subject to the same disregard), and occasional car-wash users all living cheek-by-jowl. Long may it thus continue!

Hence my reference to the Pringle wearing Volvo brigade.

indeed - it was your comment that reminded me of the book. And you've put to rest my sudden oh-no-was-that-a-completely-different-book-am-I-losing-my-marbles worry!

Ahh, of course it does, and with that title you are my second favourite professor.

[QUOTE=Oakvillian;6914383 Polishing the car on the street every Sunday morning is a defining factor of the upper-working or lower-middle boundary[/QUOTE]

My former neighbour did that, early and for hours. I had always thought it was to get up and out the door before his revolting wife woke up and possibly felt frisky. Now I realise it was all about class.

Which reminds me of a completely different book I was reading in Chapters. It was an American womans view of the British. I think she is a journalist married to a diplomat posted to London. If I could remember what it was called I would get it out of the library. Anyroad, she seemed to have some accurate observations of Britons and class.

One of the Canadian diplomats I used to work with in London told me that Yes Minister is used as a training aid for people being posted to London.

Ah yes. I'd forgotten you have my business e-mail address. Spiffy title, eh?

I used to work with a relative of on of the writers, seems it's pretty accurate. The episode where the new hospital was running perfectly well until they moved the patients in, is particularly true.

Spiffy, indeed. I find it astonishing that you smoke.

Spiffy is a very Canadian word, eh?

What was the link to?

Oh, just an article in the Daily Mash parodying UK attitudes to class and eduction. It's quite amusing.

You mean spliffy, I think.