NSFW: You snooty fucking jumped up lidl.

Like many a hand dryer reviewer before me, I am conflicted about class. I am fully aware that class is a construct used to control the masses by setting us against each other – have the working and middle classes fight so that the ruling elite have the attention and anger deflected away from them as they continue to oppress us. It also keeps people content with being screwed because they feel that buying the guardian and baking twee muffins in Cath Kidston aprons means they’ve got somewhere in life rather than question why they’re still unhappy and who might be the cause of it.

But at the same time I’m aware of how uncomfortable I am around people who identify as middle class and how much I self-identify as working class. I lived my childhood on council estates, my parents on benefits,  and we called our evening meal “tea.” There was no expectation in our family to go to university in fact I can’t think of any of my relations who went bar my sister and cousin – but in both cases that was only in the last couple of years and not at the time when all my peers who were sons-of-architects had swanned off to Oxford or Cambridge.

I recently went to a plant and book sale where people talked in swollen Radio 4 accents about how much their houses cost and laughed at how some people actually shopped at ASDA. Then again I look down on my aunt, not just because she is a petty racist, but because her manner and vernacular seem common to me when compared to my own demeanour. Yes, I am a hypocrite. As time goes by I think this is actually the primary characteristic of human beings, not valour or kindness, selfishness or that weird feeling you get when you’re on a stationary train and the train next to you moves and just for a moment you feel like your train is the one that’s moving. Not a defining characteristic of humans you say? Ever seen a snail or a gibbon or a pike have that feeling? No, thought not. It takes sufficiently advanced brain functions and anyway I’m getting away from the point.  And while I’m away from it I have to confess I wrote a hip hop song when I was 14 called Class Warfare, which started with the lines, “Class warfare and the battle lines are drawn/I’m out on the frontline kicking up a storm.” Forgive me, I have sinned.

So anyway…you can imagine how awkward I feel at Waitrose. I hate the way people carry themselves in there, like they are so much better because they are buying the same stuff I get at Morrisons or Asda for an inflated price and they don’t have to deal with any riff raff. And yet I know if I was in Aldi that’s how I’d carry myself.

I have a way of dealing with this – protest shitting. First of all I ask the poshest looking member of staff “where are the bloody bogs in ‘ere?” The combination of the vulgar term for the lavatory/WC plus dropping my H and cursing usually makes them wince. But my game has only just begun. Next I head to the bogs and proceed to drop the kind of P-bomb that could easily be mistaken for an act of biological warfare. Let me be blunt- I don’t have shits, I have exorcisms. And the thought of those middle class shoppers having to encounter that makes me laugh. Uncontrollably. The spasms of chortling only contrive to make me unleash more brown fury.

I’m not a sicko though. I wash my hands afterwards. And that’s where Waitrose really lets itself down. All that money they’re fleecing out of aspirational teachers who knit pastel yoga mats, you’d think they’d invest in a Dyson or Air Fury. Nope, just a shitty Manrose.

Waitrose: you’ve let me down, you’ve let your customers down, but most of all…

You’ve let yourself down.

You snooty fucking jumped up lidl.