This is the Life: We are all common

Well, it's back to work tomorrow and I think that I can look back upon my hols with a profound sense of satisfaction. I printed a hundred Christmas cards and only sent 20. I was present when my two-year-old niece, Honor, first said "lady-boy". I avoided eating a single Brussels sprout (all the rich, complex flavour of the compost heap) and I headed off my husband's and brother-in-law's robust attempts to persuade me that Werner Herzog's Heart of Glass was

Well, it's back to work tomorrow and I think that I can look back upon my hols with a profound sense of satisfaction. I printed a hundred Christmas cards and only sent 20. I was present when my two-year-old niece, Honor, first said "lady-boy". I avoided eating a single Brussels sprout (all the rich, complex flavour of the compost heap) and I headed off my husband's and brother-in-law's robust attempts to persuade me that Werner Herzog's Heart of Glass was

ideal New Year viewing. "But it's the only film ever made where the entire cast was hypnotised." Which is about as enticing as the only film ever made where everyone was asleep, on crack, or hideously maimed by branding irons. "Hmm, I wonder why they only did that the once?" Call me old-fashioned, but I think the perfect family movie features talking animals, singing nuns or flying cars.

My mother, meanwhile, watched every single repeat of The Office, which she discovered rather later than most of the population when she retired after 34 years of running a pub. I am finding her new TV viewing habits hard to deal with. Last year, let me remind you, she not only watched Pop Idol, she voted for Gareth. Now, after a lifetime's fixation on classic dramas such as I, Claudius and The Barchester Chronicles, she shows every sign of being gripped by EastEnders. My aunt has not been a help. She refused to come over on Boxing Day unless her daily dose of Albert Square was part of the deal. And these are the same two women who once thought my granny was going ga-ga when she started reading a tabloid newspaper.

The insulting thing about my mother's new egalitarian television regime is that my childhood was blighted by her refusal to let us watch ITV on the grounds it was "common". This baffling judgement meant that you could watch as much of The Two Ronnies as you wished but very little Tommy Cooper and while Blue Peter was fine, Magpie (ITV's then flagship kids' programme) was utterly unspeakable.

Looking back, Middle England's snobbery in the Seventies was far more impenetrable than Nancy Mitford's Fifties' "U and non-U" strictures, which mainly meant truly posh people never used words derived from the French, such as serviette or toilet. In my childhood, things were just deemed common without explanation and you feared contamination by association. So if you were offered Angel Delight (Instant Whip puddings were "very common indeed") at a friend's house, you had to stifle your instinctive dread that eating it would make you as common as the person who had served it up. Other prohibited items included hair-bobbles, bubble-gum, Barbie and Tiny Tears. Nice children had hair-ribbons, Fingers of Fudge, Sindy and Sacha dolls (these latter had lightly tanned skin, doubtless from yachting holidays off Sardinia, wore gingham dresses and won design awards). And children were always "children", never "kids", which was dreadfully common.

This makes my parents sound like terrific snobs, but it was far more pragmatic than that. They just shared a widespread belief that if you were ambitious for your children, a good education included steering them towards the social mores of the ruling élite. All of which had proved true for their generation. They weren't to know how swiftly within their offspring's lifetime the standard English tones, once beloved of the BBC, would become the most reviled accent in the UK; that "trailer trash" and "ghetto fabulous" would evolve into top catwalk looks; that everything my mother once deemed "cheap tat" would be redeemed with the new taste for "ironic" shopping and that we would have a Prime Minister who clearly believes he wins a new vote every time he says "kids" (dropped with all the street savvy of Cliff Richard in Summer Holiday).

As we sail through the first week of 2003, I think we can confidently say that "common" is dead. The concept went into terminal decline in the Nineties when a pop star who looked and sounded like a girl from a Boots' Number 7 counter earned the sobriquet "Posh" (well, you can't expect a lifetime's indoctrination at my mother's skirt-hems without a few scars). If Victoria Beckham was posh, just how common was common? If you grafted Jordan on to Jade you might get halfway there; but could you possibly bandy such an insult around and not get knifed? Obviously not. The safest thing to say, as John Prescott did, is that we're all middle-class now.

Safe, but not the least bit true. The middle classes' defining characteristic was self-improvement, and I don't notice many people reading George Eliot or tuning in to BBC4. My neighbour, Richard Cook, is probably the only person in Britain who can quote Daniel Deronda's first line, "Was she beautiful, or was she not beautiful?" A question the rest of the world addresses to the pictures of Sophie Ellis Bextor in Heat. And, like my mother, everyone watches EastEnders, The Office and Pop Idol – just as we all shop in Tesco, Safeway, or whatever. The real truth of the matter is that we are all common now.

A mini rebellion

Now that I know how common I am, I can rush off to the sales and buy one of this season's micro-minis. Trinny and Susannah, the only posh people left in Britain, would doubtless tell me that I'm much too old to wear one – but I am far too common to care about that. The first time I worried about being a little decrepit for mini skirts I was 25. A decade later I'm certain the only thing that need stand between a woman and a short skirt is fat thighs. The basic rule of thumb on fashion is "if it works for you, stick to it". Can you imagine anyone telling Raquel Welch and Sophia Loren, "Ladies, you're just too damn old to get your tits out."

Style experts only exist to humiliate the vulnerable and at least Trinny and Susannah have the good grace to admit this. Others from their charlatan trade pretend to act from the purest style motives while sending clients out in monstrosities such as the £800 plum satin Alexander McQueen dress seen on Ulrika at her book-launch and worn since by countless other celebs. How anyone could admire this hideous garment – much trumpeted as 2002's "dress of the year" – is a mystery. Satin is a lovely fabric for shirts and long, slinky bias-cut evening gowns but the stuff of nightmare when it comes to Empire line (male readers may like to know this means the skirt material falls from just below the bust). The dress makes skinny women look flat-chested and waistless, while curvier types resemble tarty milkmaids. As a final insult to the female form, it comes in a particularly dirgy shade of purple best described as "week-old bruise". It's the kind of dress that makes you glad to be poor and, in this spirit of penury, I offer my top three style tips for free.

First, a rug-rethink is worth five new frocks. Second, the little black dress is back – don't buy one! Bob along the sartorial Styx in a little red number instead. My third tip is based on something I read about a journalist who wrote columns for the Daily Mail and some socialist rag. He would swap the pieces over just before dispatching them because he knew the articles were far more provocative if launched on hostile territory. If I am asked, say, to a Spectator bash and a GQ event in the same week, I will wear the pussy pelmet to the Speccie and a Thirties tea-dress to GQ.As any woman knows, the answer to "What not to wear" is "anything that any other female in the room is wearing".