Pret Mince Pie Review

I'm not even gonna pretend I wasn't always going to get distracted and write a huge semi-ironic cultural manifesto about the class system

Right off the bat there is something ungenerous seeming about a mince pie that, instead of a totally encased pie crust, instead boosts a star on the top, exposing some of the mincemeat underneath. Makes you feel robbed of a few inches of pastry. But, on second thoughts, it makes sense for the international crowd. We've all read that American mommy food blog recipe for a "traditional British mince pie" haven't we? That uses ground beef and must taste absolutely fucking awful? So I guess they need to display what the inside actually is, so the Americans don't get confused.

Americans in general think British food is absolutely dire. They go to London and eat at Angus steakhouse at Piccadilly Circus, eat stale sandwiches at afternoon tea at the Charing cross hostel, and eat fish and chips at a Mayfair pub surrounded by hedge funds and low ranking art dealers. They are right to be annoyed. London is, of all the cities I've been to, the one with the most separate tourist and local experience, particularly with regards to food. New Yorkers actually eat bagels and dollar slice pizza. Parisians actually eat thin cut rare steak. But Londoners don't have afternoon tea.

But the England that is sold to the world is totally different to England as it is. I remember listening to a podcast with an American professor who was a historian of the full English breakfast - she was so disappointed she couldn't find it anywhere except the Dorchester. She was thinking of a historically accurate Full English the upper classes would have as a celebration - a dish which typically featured kippers and devilled eggs. The "Full English" as understood by the English evolved from taking the tone of this fancy treat and making into a working class labourer's breakfast, full of fat and protein and served at a caff. I've never been to a London caff. Added to the fact they closed Little Chef and I haven't been on a ferry in ages then I haven't really had a Full English as imagined by most English people in absolutely years. I have, of course, had many a hipster version of the full English at brunch places up and down the country - called something like "the Big One" or "the whole plate" to dodge the allegations of Class Tourism.

But that is the weird experience of being English middle class. All the stuff that is "high culture" - the sort of stuff that a Cambridge grad who listens to jazz and reads Deleuze for fun would in ordinary circumstances be into - that stuff has been commodified, packaged and sold to foreigners. Every year I decide to wake up at 5am to join the 4 hour queue to have the previlege of paying £25 to stand behind a braying American on Wimbledon Court 17 and every time I am disgusted by it. Everything is "iconic" and sponsored by Rolex, or Jaguar, or Ralph Lauren. Robinson were binned off, presumably because the Qatari royal family don't drink squash. There is a palpable sense that London is being sold off to the world's elite - and an idealised image of Englishness that is only relevant to the aristocracy is the marketing tool.

Authentic working class culture arose in the spaces the aristos couldn't go. We've spoken about the need for pain points in cool before - and with English working class culture the point is worth making. Working class people in Britain are allowed to be themselves only in spaces posh people won't go to. In pubs that smell of piss, cigarettes and crime. Behind the pages of lads mags. In nightclubs listening to pounding music that only sounds tolerable when under the influence of substances that the aristos wouldn't go near.
English songwriting comes from the Music Hall - bawdy lyrics, girls in frilly knickers, cigarette smoke everywhere. A posho would be shunned just be going there - allowing the development of the song as an authentic cultural form that would eventually have its apotheosis with The Beatles. This is all a bit broad brush but you get the point.

The English Class system was always based on the idea that there's the nobility and the peasantry - who have nothing in common whatsoever - and then the middle class who contain a bit of both and thus become suited to water-carrying roles in society like law and management consultancy - not the actual productive stuff like warmaking or farming. The 80's changed all that. Suddenly we were led to believe that the watercarrying stuff - functional but unproductive industries like banking - were actually the whole basis of the economy. This seemed to finally bring Thomas Cromwell's dream to reality - a Middle Class Britain with no inbred pony-fucking aristocracy. (BTW I've started watching Wolf Hall and currently every single one of my takes is filtered through the English Reformation c. 1530, supplementing my general Hobbesian understanding that its all about the English Civil War a hundred years later.)

Anyway, this shift of economic emphasis led to the culture changing very quickly. Suddenly the stuff you were supposed to like - champagne and oyster bars on the king's road; Renaissance art; golf - all of that become horribly tragic. Now its all Blur's Parklife cover at the dog-tracks, and Damien Hurst, and the word "wankpuffin" and John Prescott saying "We're all Middle Class now." But the middle classes are cursed - we have no culture of our own. We are water-carriers; cultural parasites. So, with the aristocratic stuff off the table, what choice do we have but to go down the pecking order? Only, that working class stuff is horribly unsophisticated. I'll scran a full English, but only with free range cacklebean eggs and some blackened miso hispi cabbage on the side. Gabber and Happy Hardcore are too stupid, but business techno? Come on - the drugs are so clean now you'll barely miss work at all. I remember Ahir Shah saying "Gentrification is posh people getting priced out of their parents racism." There's a lot to that. The hollowing out of British public life and mass culture is a direct result of the aristos selling off the high culture, leaving the middle class with nowhere to go but to working class culture, and ruining it.

Look, chatgpt is fucking shit. Way worse than it used to be actually. Just imagine what I imagined (the blur parklife cover with a mince pie) and get on your merry way. We’ll have an illustrator soon alright.

Meanwhile, the aristos swear revenge on the middle classes. They killed Thomas Cromwell, then watched in despair as his nephew's grandson killed King Charles I. They started plantations, conquered the world - and then the capitalists got their hands on that as well. By 1915 there was only one option. The European aristocracy agreed to go to war with each other, against the advice of their bourgeouis governments, sending hundreds of thousands of working class men to their deaths to once more assert their presence at the top of the state. WWII showed that this return to aristocratic power was temporary. Into the mid-20th century we see a managed retreat. The aristos assert cultural dominance over an increasingly educated population - making us all pretend to enjoy classical music and poetry. They sold absolutely everything they could to keep up the fight - Knightsbridge and Mayfair to Russian Oligarchs; Wimbledon to Hedge Funds; the NHS to American tech companies. They even founded little student societies and gave themselves little titles like "Prime Minister David Cameron" and "Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osbourne." But still, everything that happened seemed out of their control. Everything they did they did so with the say-so of the bankers. So they became hedge fund managers, and made huge bets against capitalism and borgeouis structures like the EU. This currently feels like its working. The War Machine is back, baby! Farage is licking his lips. But, they are fighting against a rising tide. The Roundheads will return, and they will smother the Cavaliers in a vat of red tape and digital platforms. There will come a day when aristos simply do not have a big presence in public life. They can't even afford to send their kids to the right schools anymore. It's all a bit pathetic.

So the middle class have won, but we have no culture. We are parasites. The aristos were thugs, but they were thugs with soul. Think of the feathers! Of the tapestries! Of the sweet lute music! Think of the working class, flourishing in the spaces the aristos wouldn't tread. The middle class have no shame, see no morality, tread wherever we like. Until the whole world is minimal, and beige. This is the end of history. It is an oat cortado in a coffee shop called The Garden Centre, which shares its monthly spotify playlist on its ever changing seasonal menu, alongside an Anthony Bourdain quote. The Last Man brunches forever.

Look, I'm a Hegelian. But I don't think this is the end of history. The aristos will come again. They always do. And when they do so it is violent. Capitalism has done many things, but it has never truly taken over the war machine. Look at the head honchos of the army. They are still called fucking Ponceby-Smythe or whatever. They still can trace a direct line of descendance from William the Conqueror. They may feel, sometime in the future, that the time has come once more to play rock, paper, scissors. And, as Thomas Cromwell found out, paper doesn't actually beat rock. So the middle class must realise what our true duty is. We are an empty vessel, a group of mediators. One who has, for the last fifty years, deviated from what was always our task. Cultural mediation, into translation, into sublimation. The task of the middle class is to bring high culture to the people - to unify English culture. We will search the cultural archives of the aristocracy and the working classes in search not of profit, but of truth and beauty. And we will find it. We will organise the state to provide opera, and classical music, and lawn tennis, and greek tragedy - to everyone.

This is the destiny of the Middle Class - the coming into being of the World Soul. And at that moment, when all and sundry are enjoying Frankenthaler and Goethe, communing with The One that is the Beginningless Ground of All Things, the Middle Classes will disappear forever. And not a moment too soon.

peace and love xoxo