Middle class adult

 

I have spent so much time with myself these last couple of days, culminating in me thinking, ‘wow I am a full-time middle-class adult’. There have been moments when I’ve doubted myself, but really this is what I am. I have no qualms, I like who I am, but it is disquieting to catch your own reflection fragmented through many forms of media. You must know what I mean.

I have started to make sourdough. Not only does my housemate have his own bubbling culture, which I easily scooped off to make my own sourdough baby, but I have many people in my close circle / rule of six menagerie, who would let me do the same.  I am very grateful and inundated with tips. Sourdough is a bastard but it’s also a baby; making me set an alarm on my phone for half hour intervals, when it needs feeding or folding.

I started to research ethical home appliances. If you’d care to know Electrolux have this campaign called the Better Living Program with a concept-trailer which is basically aimed entirely at me. I love it, obviously. Although I don’t get why in the non-Anglo-American sites this scheme of machines is called The Green Collection and not the Better Living Program. I wondered why we were so lifestyle aspirational that we needed a continuous verb to bolster my purchase of a vacuum cleaner. Other countries are clearly on board with greener living, easy peasy – costs more but it’s cleaner – but for me, I need to know that what I’m doing is making my life “better”.

I watched a BBC Four documentary. It was about Black British artists and why they’re overlooked or get pigeon-holed, to be forgotten and side-lined by the art world. I did not know that the first Black Female artist to win the Turner Prize happened in 2017, Lubaina Himid, who was 65 at the time and had been making art for decades. Imagine, doing your thing for 30 years and then being the first of your kind to win the thing. I sat drinking my wine, shaking my head.