You can’t buy class. Ask any football manager. But in Britain its actually a fact. ‘Class’ is what posh aristocrats have, what they’re born with, what they’ve inherited from their prestigious forebears and for everyone else, no amount of Ferraris, tattoos or semi-naked selfies can buy it.

An impoverished, unemployed scrounger is thus ‘better’ than Bill Gates if said scrounger had a great, great, great, great grandparent who went to war with George the Second who bestowed upon this ancestor a meaningless title and some land. Gates is just ‘nouveau riche’ and thus an upstart.

Yet they say that the class system is antiquated, anachronistic, meaningless. And very British.

Most people have heard of The Queen. She’s class. In fact she’s really number 1 in the class Class. All her immediate family are thus ‘class by association’. But as you move down to the 3rd cousins twice removed and the rest of the titled upper class of this fine land, that class manifests itself in somewhat less classy ways, as the ‘entitled’ ones feel just that, that they are entitled by their title. Lord this, the Duke of that, the Earl of whatever, they were all born with that metaphorical ‘silver spoon’ lodged between their teeth-less gums and for many they looked no further than sheer good fortune for their lifelong fortunes.

Some people of humble origins (‘scum’, as they’re known) rise above their birthrights and become titled. Lord Sugar is one. Total scum, nasty little self-made trillionaire who we forgive to some extent because he was involved in Spurs for a while, though a very moaning, complaining ‘while’ it was. But generally these ‘life peers’ (they don’t hand their Lordships to subsequent generations like ‘real’ peers) are just regarded as mutton dressed as a donner kebab.

Sir Richard Glyn is the real deal. A man so aristocratic and upper class that no-one’s ever heard of him. Even his parents apparently used to say ‘Richard who??’ But he’s from a long line of Glyns and Gaunts, dating back to Henry IV. And of course he has a stately home. Gaunts House. Just 2000 acres of Bournemouth countryside and its a small abode, just 60 bedrooms. Hardly ‘stately’ at all really.

And we can only assume (which may be doing Ricky-baby a big disservice but that’s really what I’m here for) that ‘being a rich bastard’ has been Richard’s career. Unburdened by the demands of paying rent, money for clothes, the buddy-can-ya-spare-a-dime-ism that plagues normal lives, he turned Gaunts House into a centre for the advancement of consciousness, for meditation, for all kinds of tree-huggery which occurred when he opened the doors in 1972. And it worked well. There was lots of successful… errr… consciousness, going on there, with almost everybody, to one degree or another. And for 40 years that’s what they did.

Then, last year, they changed. They adjusted their primary ethos to make it just a bit more ‘zeitgeist’. It became a survivalist centre for the post-apocalypse. ‘Preppers’ they’re called. Preparing for life after… something bad. Possibly just excessive carbon monoxide, possibly political and economic melt-down, but the modus is the same. Surviving. On road-kill. Berries. Eating weak or old people. Building a home out of twigs and leaves that can survive a nuclear blast. That kind’a thing.

And you need real ‘class’ to make that quantum leap from ‘advanced consciousness’ to ‘ninja survivalist warrior’ in one swoop. Mere commoners just couldn’t do that.

Happy Friday

A xxxx