The Daily Telegraph

I’m middle class and poor. It wasn’t supposed to be like this...

- ROWAN PELLING READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion

The word “comfort” and the middle classes used to be pretty much synonymous. Think of Jane Austen’s excessive fondness for the term: her heroines set out to achieve a generous dollop of comfort in their romantic and domestic circumstan­ces. Most readers empathise with that quest. Indeed, you’d pretty much think the whole point of the bourgeoisi­e was to be comfortabl­e, and to radiate the special brand of inner calm that comes with plentiful ISAs, Agas and en-suite bathrooms.

But, of late, something’s gone badly awry. According to a new YouGov survey, 31 per cent of the UK’s middle strata would struggle to pay an unexpected bill of £500, without resorting to borrowing. Which is rather extraordin­ary, when you think that having something stashed away for a rainy day was the cornerston­e of domestic prudence for middle England for generation­s.

My late mother believed this to such an extent that she almost passed out when she discovered that I couldn’t afford to have my car fixed (back in 1998, when I was newly wed and my husband had told me he “didn’t believe in joint bank accounts”), and she lent me a grand on the spot. She told me that, as a principle of basic household law, “You must always have at least a thousand pounds in a secret bank account to deal with emergencie­s, or to use as a running-away fund.” I followed her advice until a year ago, when I needed to poach the reserve for a mortgage repayment and never replaced it. This is just the inevitable result, as YouGov analysts state, of salaries staying pretty much static while living costs rise.

I’ve just returned from a jolly weekend with a bunch of middle-aged profession­al types at the Hay Festival. Of the dozen or so people I spoke to on the delicate matter of personal finances,

only a GP and a two tenured academics had their own pension funds; none of us could afford private school fees, or holidays abroad for our children. As one friend said mournfully: “I used to think being motivated by money was rather vulgar; but that’s when I was earning lots of moolah, back in the Nineties.”

Much of our idle chat seemed to come straight out of E Nesbit’s classic book, The Story of the

Treasure Seekers, as we tried, like the Bastables, to conjure up brilliant ways of boosting our family fortunes. Artisanal food products were our first and obvious line of inquiry. If other people can make a fortune with badly iced cupcakes and crisps that cost a fiver a pop, surely we could identify a gap in the market for food that looks hand-hewn by out-of-work publishers?

But the most obvious way of alleviatin­g middle-class financial worries is the most traditiona­l; a fact acknowledg­ed by George Osborne in the last Budget, when he increased the tax-free allowance for Airbnb hosts. Rent out a room! Or why not sleep on your sofa, put your children in the workhouse and rent out the entire house?

I’ve worked out that if I put my sons in together and lose my middle-class angst about children having their own rooms, I could free up our middle-class loft for the sort of middleclas­s travellers who can no longer afford hotels. We will be squished, we will be grumpy, we’ll have lost a considerab­le portion of comfort. But we can moan with our guests about the tragic decline in living standards. And, as all Britons know, a gripe shared is a gripe thoroughly enjoyed. So we’ll all feel strangely comfortabl­e again.

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