Growing up middle class in the 70s and 80s wasn’t cool. In fact, it was really boring. Working class people had a kind of effortless rough style about them. They were allowed to mock your affections without fear of retribution because they’d pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. The upper classes could be cool too, because they just didn’t care. I remember an ex-girlfriend whose titled father would fart, burp and express sympathy for communists at the dinner table. If I’d said anything, even to her in private, I’d have had my suburban mores handed to me on a 400-year-old silver platter.

The middle classes had none of these freedoms. Rather, we were stuck in a straitjacket of bourgeois values. But we bore the cross of suburban uncool happily. Why? Because the 60s and 70s and even the 80s and 90s treated us well. I was reminded of this watching Back In Time For The Weekend on BBC2 last week. The programme follows a middle class family of four as they try and live in decades from the 50s to the 00s. So far, they’re up to the 70s and it all looks rather charming. There’s a sense of progress; every decade life gets better.