Friday evening my wife and I met up with friends and got to discussing the class issue - as you do.

One of our friends suggested that a simple determinant of a person’s class is how they spend their disposable income. I suggested that this definition was limited in efficiency simply because people who had little disposable income would lack the means to define themselves adequately this way. A person who just scrapes a living makes very different decisions about their spending than a person with 5 or 6 hundred pounds a month left over after all outgoings.

On another point about class I suggested that the various facts that defined one’s class included elements that one cannot alter and that, therefore, whichever class environment one is born into that, more or less, meant that one is forever of that class.

That proved contentious too but I think this was because my friend sees class hierarchially, with the progression from the underclass to the upper classes as being representative of a stepped increase in virtue. And so my view that I, for example, was born working class and would therefore die working class was regarded as my handicapping myself with limitation and stunting my potential to improve my lot due to a surrender to some sort of social inevitability.

But this isn’t so. One’s first 20 or so years on this planet are usually the most formative. Even if I one day became wordly wise, educated, generous and wealthy those first decades are not erased and the influence of my working class family and the conditions in which we lived still exist in some form within me. It may be that I am repelled by those experiences or it could be that I am inspired by them. But they are real and meaningful and they form one of the bases of what I do later in life - even if what I do in later life has all the hallmarks of being middle class.

I am neither proud nor ashamed of my class; I am indifferent to it. I am not constrained - or conditioned - by it either but if we are all affected to some extent by our environement then my council house start in life, my father’s entrepreneurial successes from very ordinary beginnings, our family’s lack of education, my grandparent’s financial discipline and ‘old fashioned’ certainties were all there as the tapestry into which my life was woven.

Just as the way we raise our children will be partly informed - negatively, positively or some combination of both - by the way we ourselves were raised so our world view, beliefs, values and principles will, in some way, be flavoured with that which prevailed at home.

The present and the future are all connected to the past. One is built on the other - even if the present is a deliberate rejection of the past. The past is always there and is always a part of you. In class terms my past is working class and working class is what I will forever be - even if my behaviours, aspirations, achievements and principles would otherwise label me as ‘middle’ class.