The Eccentricity Clause

Which brings me to a further complicating factor: taste is often judged, in social terms, not by the deed but by the doer. If someone is securely established as a member of a particular class, his or her house may feature a number of exceptions to the rules I have mentioned without any danger of reclassification downwards or upwards. I read somewhere recently that Princess Anne’s house, Gatcombe Park, is cluttered with displays of every gift she has ever received, including the sort of tacky national dolls and cheap African carvings normally only found in working-class �front rooms’. Such signs of plebeian tastes among the upper classes or even long-established upper-middles are generally regarded as harmless eccentricities.

And it works the other way round as well. I had a friend of impeccable working-class credentials – a school cleaner, living on a run-down council estate – who had a passion for the upper-class equestrian sport of eventing (also known as Horse Trials, and also, incidentally, favoured by Princess Anne). She kept a horse (free in return for mucking-out) at a nearby riding school, and her council-house kitchen was festooned with rosettes and photographs of herself competing in local hunter-trials and one-day events. Her working-class friends and neighbours accepted her �posh’ horsey doings and decorations as an innocuous quirk, a somewhat eccentric hobby which in no way affected her status as their social equal.

This �eccentricity clause’ seems to be most reliably effective at the top and bottom ends of the social scale. The middle-middle, lower-middle, upper-working and even upper-middle zones are more vulnerable to re-classification on the grounds of perceived deviation from the class norm. Here, a single lapse in home-decorating taste may be forgiven or disregarded, but two or more could be damaging. Even among the less vulnerable, it is safest to choose your eccentricity from a class at the opposite end of the scale, rather than from the one immediately adjacent to your own. An upper-middle showing evidence of middle-middle tastes, for example, is much more likely to be suspected and downgraded than an upper-middle with a penchant for an unmistakably proletarian item of furniture or decoration.

In borderline cases, well-intentioned gifts can pose a problem for the class-conscious English. I was once given some very pretty wooden coasters, and not having any tables worth protecting from drink-stains – nor, I must admit, wishing to be suspected of the bourgeois instinct to do so – I use them to prop open my dodgy windows. I could get the broken sashes mended instead, of course, but then what would I do with the coasters? Being English can be quite tricky sometimes.

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