The Color of Your Wallet, How You Hold Your Knife, Your Handshake
The devil is in the detail. In Britain we do judge a person by small, seemingly insignificant minutiae.
You may think you’re pretty recherché but are you more Elephant and Castle than Alnwick Castle?
Let’s find out….
Handshake
You can tell so much about someone from their handshake. Too firm and perhaps they are over compensating; too limp and they’re bound to posses a rather timid personality. A good handshake is firm, but not too firm and comes from the wrist, not the arm.
Fail to greet someone with a solid handshake and you may as well pack your bags and go home there and then.
How you greet someone
It’s not just how we shake hands but what we say to accompany it. The upper classes will all say ‘how do you do’, which is rhetorical. ‘Pleased/nice to meet you’ is the definition of de trop.
Saying it is treated as rather suspect.
When the middle-class Middleton family first entered into Prince William’s life, his peers referred to them as the ‘Nice to meet you Middletons’. Amongst other things.
Braces
Braces seem to be back into men’s fashion, even with the increasingly androgynous ladies’ fashion, too. But men, make sure your braces are NOT clip-on ones.
Ever been called a spiv? No? Well, wear clip-on braces if you want to become very familiar with the term.
Braces that fasten to buttons sewn into your trousers are much more PLU (as well as secure).
Colour of shoes
Perhaps one of the most silent of class signals is whether a person (male or female) wears brown shoes in London and big cities on a Monday to Thursday. Fridays and weekends are permissible for brown in town, however.
This stems back to the era when men would travel to their country pile from working in the city on Fridays. Brown shoes are for country wear; black for cities. If you were wearing brown shoes in London on a Saturday it was presumably as you had travelled in from the country.
This rule is less followed these days but the top tier still known.
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