THE BEAUTIFUL BOURGEOISIE

In last week's Sunday Times' there was a truly meticulous pen portrait of your average bourgeois by Greta Lamb.

Sitting in a workmen's café opposite the modern, if somewhat tinny, Gray's Inn Rd headquarters of the self-professed 'world's best newspaper' last week, I was struck by how accurately Greta Lamb's account captured the social essence even of many of the 'Sunday Times' literary figures.

Relaxed, informal, bright shirts, suedes and woolly scarves, quiet but individual dresses, lazy, rich, accents, alert, concerned, sociable.

'The middle class are so nice,' wrote Lamb, 'not touchy and not always standing up for their 'Bourgeois people have soft voices and behave in a civilized way. It is a pleasure to watch them at table.

•Middle-class people like wood, silk, leather and all things that have lived.

'Much that enchants is beloved by the middle class; Georgian houses and Georgian Silver, books, lovely materials, furniture of such lovely proportions that it brings tears to the eyes.

'Most of them appreciate wit (Ustinov, Morley). Subtlety and understatement are the breath of life to them.

'Cricket and lawn tennis are middle-class games.

*Bourgeois women dislike glitter' and "middle-class people are sensitive to atmosphere knowing when they are welcome and when to make a move.

'The bourgeoisie have been brought up to oil the wheels of social intercourse' Oh bliss! Oh never-ending summer! The beautiful bourgeoisie.

How strange to reflect that it was one of those beautiful 'Sunday Times'-type bourgeois who, using every four-letter word the book, once came close to smashing a champagne bottle over a colleague's head accusing him of forcing politics down her throat.

Even beauty, it appears, is a unity of opposites. But there is more to it than that.

Under normal circumstances, with £100 a week going into the bank, perhaps the odd percentage rolling in from a modest share portfolio and with no rights sufficiently threatened to shout about the 'beautiful bourgeoisie' is content to roll about on its cloth of gold, its brain addled with too prolonged a study of Georgian silver.

But take away the cloth gold and the claws come out. As Lamb herself says: 'When Persian rugs wear thin and brocade curtains fray' that is time to speak out.

Let class war commence, you might almost say. Vandals have got over the wire and are stomping about in the flower beds.

But who are the vandals? According to Lamb they are the ones who at table 'sprawl, displaying their crotches, they "hunch' they "bawl at waiters', they 'handle their cutlery like picks and shovels,' they 'drink when their mouths are full'.

They are the people who like 'plastic and man-made fibres'.

'Plastic went straight to the hearts of many of whose houses and gardens were soon full of it. They will soon demand plastic tombstones damp cloth), Just wipe with a They are the people who 'despoil our countryside with empty ice cream tubs, crusts of bread, chewed gum, sweet papers and cigarette packs'. Their 'babies sit in prams discarding lolly sticks over the side'.

They are the people who 'enjoy jokes (taking the mickey, getting sloshed, false teeth)' They are the people who throw bottles at 'matches and tournaments' and 'on homeward journeys "slash" railway seats or drag cisterns off walls.

"Their women are the women who wear dresses of shiny stuff and who have bridesmaids in icy blue and are presented with silver cardboard horseshoes.' They are the people who get *cards for everything (thank you, et well. congratulations on your one 'O' level)'.

They are the people who enjoy 'plastic gnomes and one-arm bandits, overchromed motorcars and sharp transistors, bawling in pubs on Saturday nights, drinking champagne in braces On aeroplanes bound for Spain'.

Says Lamb: 'It is hard for a member of the bourgeoisie to bridge the gap and feel at home'.

Our hearts bleed. The bourgeoisie may think they look beautiful, but there is not much pretty about their thoughts.

THE AUEW National Committee yesterday c unanimously a resolution opposing the Tor!