Many of us like to try to understand a person we are talking to, a person we have just met. We want to know more about them. We often want to place them in our context. There is a useful phrase to describe all of this. It’s often referred to as ‘class’.
I wonder how many times you’ve been asked, “Where did you go to school”, or “Where are your children at school?”
If my answer to either of those questions was “Bishops”, you’d know it already…
I have lost count of how many times I’ve been asked one of those questions by other middle-class South Africans. And how many times I’ve asked the question myself.
A friend of a friend who lives in the UK told me recently that when they were planning their holiday here, her British husband remarked that he would spend his December listening to middle-aged people asking each other what school they had gone to.
