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Jake Hall
Jun 11, 2018
Photo: iStock / peterspiro / Twitter / @SamWhyte
Doilies, gravy boats, serving plates - what do all of these things have in common?
Well, according to this popular Twitter thread, they're all indicators that you might just be 'a bit posh.'
Last week, stand-up comedian Sam Whyte tweeted about a discussion she had presumably had with friends about how they could tell if someone was posh from looking around their house.
The tweet received thousands of responses, some of which were bewildering - did you know a room 'for best' is a thing? - and others of which were entirely relatable.
Some users recalled nipping to their friends' houses for dinner and being allowed to dish up their own food from serving dishes (think of the washing up!), whereas others talked about pals that were lucky enough to receive actual 'allowances'.
One woman recalls her parents would trick her and her sister into using their pocket money to top up the electricity meter, whereas another user made jokes about expensive fresh fruit being permissible only in case of illness.
The thread is revelatory of an important point: we might talk a lot about class in Britain, but the lines that divide it are tricky to define.
Many of the replies seem tethered to a certain era of electricity meters, posh dinner party cheese and colour screen television sets in more than one room, but as we hurtle forwards into a world dominated by the freelance economy and the rise of technology, the lines between 'working class' and 'middle class' are more blurred than ever before.
This is important; for many, class is a definitional trait, as the replies show. Add the mainstream media's reputation for creating exploitative 'poverty porn' into the mix and you can end up with a portrait of working class life that's detached from the reality.
Still, the thread proves that the smallest things can be the funniest - as proven by one user that describes Coca-Cola (not rola cola!) as the ultimate sign of being posh.