Confessions of a class tourist

Pundits writing for a young audience are always telling readers to ‘stop pretending to be working-class!’ and stop ‘fetishising the working class’. They seem more angered by the imitation of class than the iniquities of class itself. Singer Lily Allen and the rap star Yungblud have both been denounced on Twitter for – to paraphrase E.P. Thompson – the faking of the English working class.

Personally, I don’t understand the fuss. For most of my youth I pretended to be working -class – and so did most of my middle–class mates (sorry, friends). And we were not alone. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the voices of youth all sounded working–class, especially the middle-class ones like Jagger, Bowie and, yes, that faux working-class hero himself, John Lennon. Today, with our fixation on cultural appropriation, they’d all be denounced on Twitter for class tourism. 

My journey into working-class tourism began when my American parents moved to London in the 1960s and I ended up attending a local north London comprehensive school called Holloway. In the hope of fitting in, I began trying to pass as just another working-class kid. Believe me, it wasn’t easy with a name like Cosmo. At Holloway you were either a Kevin, a Gary, a Dave, or you were a ‘tosser’ with a funny name.

Matters weren’t helped by my macrobiotic parents’ insistence that I took a packed lunch of such exotic delights as miso and tahini sandwiches, umeboshi plums and tubs of seaweed. My working-class companions had not yet learned to love the smell of curry, so you could imagine the impact my lunch had. I still remember the trauma I suffered when a classmate found my hidden lunch and brought it to the attention of the rest of the class – there were cries of horror, loud sounds of gagging and much mock vomiting.

Still, I was determined to fit in.