A four minute thought.
During a recent astronomy class, I had a thought. Which class am I in? Am I a working class comet or a middle class meteor? Despite studying the cosmos today, I am still pondering my own place in society.
I struggle to process my emotions, so I have not read or watched the news in ten years. At times, I feel very uninformed. I catch snippets of headlines through social media, work emails, and my feed, just enough to be able to engage in small talk before a meeting starts.
As a child, I was raised on benefits, and as an adult, I’ve survived off them. By definition, I’m working class and an oxymoron. By the time I was living independently at 16, my aspirations were not to study languages at university, they were to claim Housing Benefit and work cash in hand at the pub.
So there is a lot I do not know.
But here is what I do know.
26,000 light-years away from Earth is the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, also known as the Galactic Centre. 26,000 years ago, humans first domesticated dogs. This means that when the first humans were forming bonds with early dogs, the light we now see from the centre of the Milky Way was just beginning its journey towards Earth.
In the vast expanse of space, we are all the same, equally small, equally fleeting. But here on Earth, we actually make distinctions. Only when you move beyond survival do you have the privilege of pondering the cosmos (and class). Astronomy is the benchmark of class mobility.
Only once I left survival behind could I lift my head to the stars.
Correct me if I am wrong, but whilst musing over our history, is there really a bunch of unelected men blocking and changing laws in a wing of Westminster? UK politics is complicated, short-term, and self-serving, but The House of Lords!
In 2025, at age 38, I live in a city with four universities, and I have a couple of degrees in my back pocket. I own my own home, and I earn enough to live a lifestyle that supports higher discretionary spending and cultural pursuits. I am now engaging with political institutions, and I went to watch an orchestra this evening! Lords and Ladies, I now suffer from middle-class problems. Let me explain.
There’s 850 of them, sitting in Parliament, stinking the place out with old money, outdated views on women, and tweed. I found out they receive what is called a peerage, passed down through hereditary lineage, only from father to son. So, if your old man was a peer or peervert, you inherit that privilege along with the estate.
I recently found myself spending a lot of time in the leafy suburb of Aigburth in Liverpool. You know that feeling when you’re no longer in chav territory because your brow unfurrows and you start to hear the subtleties of middle class life, birdsong and the quiet hum of Teslas.
Then I hear the relentless drone of a leaf blower’s combustion engine, wielded by landscape gardeners haunting the colonial grounds of mansions long converted into flats, and it just stirs something deep inside me. I can’t stand them. They’re clearly underpaid, which is why they’re not raking it in. The other day, I almost told one that being on unemployment benefits is nobler, but he couldn’t hear a word I was saying anyway, so I just ran off with his ear defenders to see how he likes it.
I’ve hammered the chav out of me as diligently as my hammered gold hoops, but despite all my education, I long for a bit of raw, unfiltered violence.
I took a deep dive into UK politics and this archaic institution we call the House of Lords. I also learnt celestial bodies have five ranks: duke, marquess, earl, viscount, and baron. Growing up, I genuinely thought these were brands of biscuits.
Now, I imagine the House of Lords as a rogue asteroid belt made up of ancient, crumbling rocks from a long-dead era. Some of these rocks, ‘appointed experts,’ may still serve a purpose, occasionally preventing reckless collisions with Earth. But most are just debris, drifting through space, exerting influence simply because they have been there forever. The hereditary peers are the worst of these, chunks of aristocratic rubble, still floating in power’s orbit, not because they serve a function but because of centuries-old, cocked momentum.
The Labour government has announced plans to finally abolish the 92 remaining hereditary peerages in this little-known club we Brits call the House of Lords.
Naturally, Charles Peregrine Falcon or some other double-barrelled relic will want to don his great-great-grandfather’s moth-eaten waistcoat and defend their position. He argues that in the short-term, self-serving world of five-year political campaigns, the Lords offer a longer-term perspective. Good point.
But then, quill in hand, he makes another argument. It is not his fault that for the past 900 years, the firstborn son of a Lord was guaranteed a seat. For 850 of those years, it bypassed all his elder sisters. Whom I image were a lot more interesting. Imagine the laws in place now if women had that mother-daughter possession of a back bench.
“It is just the way it has always been.”
Not such a good point.
Got it! Here’s a version with a cosmic analogy:
The right to hereditary peerage was technically abolished by the House of Lords Act in 1999, except for 92 seats. The swines have clung on so desperately, like rogue asteroids trapped in the decaying orbit of a dying star, that history itself is on the verge of a supernova just to shake them loose. (AI Assisted Analogy) They are so old, maybe they are one orgasm away from death, about to be sucked off by the supermassive black hole of history. (Dr Books)
And maybe that is what class mobility is, the slow defying of gravity, allowing me to drift just far enough from poverty to look up at the sky. To ponder something bigger than council tax bands, to watch the planets align over Liverpool and think about a future where history’s dead weight no longer holds us in its orbit.
It seems for now, in politics at least, gravity wins.
majorloveme 