The birthday girl’s mother stood up. “Tiny Pony wants to make a little speech,” she said. And so she did.
We were at the White Horse in Putney, also known as the Sloaney Pony (pronounced Slaney Painy.) I was Simon’s date in the college friends’ corral, where they explained that though it was Cambridge, Churchill college took mostly state school kids, and was not at all posh, really. Unlike the rest of the guests. This distinction seemed important to them, and I believed them. Simon isn’t posh. He speaks with the new Tony Blair Establishment accent, full of democratic glottal stops. Our corral bonded as the yahs and brays increased down-table; we swapped compensating stories of council estate beatings and jam sandwiches.

I get infected with interest in this stuff as soon as I get to a British Airways check-in queue. I start listening and classifying, and watching others do it faster than me. Words and and accent peg you here, and they’ll always piss someone off. If you’re uncomfortable being having your origins and aspirations dissected, try an Irish accent. Thug? Posh totty? Only Dublin knows for sure.

I keep asking my friends about this obsession, sure that I’m exaggerating as usual. But maybe not. Elly tells me about her friend whose boyfriend wouldn’t take her to the May Ball, in case she might embarrass herself because she doesn’t speak properly. “She might say ‘toilet’ instead of ‘loo’ or something.” The friend reported this to Elly as proof of his consideration for her.

That class boorishness is dying. Nobody would coach Margaret Thatcher on a fake upper-class accent these days; the plummy Tories are a joke. Piers Morgan looks and sounds like a flabby young Roger Moore, but he edits Rottweiler tabloid The Sun. Little England tabloid The Daily Mail. The Daily Mirror*. The old BBC accent , which I’ve always liked, is being phased out, replaced by regional voices and the estuary English that’s becoming the new standard. No single class, identified by accent or schooling, seems to have a lock on a given industry or profession any more. Maybe classification is mostly a leisure activity now, social Tetris.

“In America, though,” they tell me when I ask about class in Britain, “they treat you like shit when you don’t have money or a flash job.”

*I’ve been annoying my English friends with my sloppy reporting. Last time I lived here, Piers Morgan was editor of The Sun. Now he edits the Daily Mirror, apparently, a fact that won’t stick in my brain even though somebody posted this in my comments a week ago. Simon writes: “Under his editorship it’s become a left-wing tabloid and a much “better” competitor to The Sun, unfortunately he has remained an odious toad.”

So there you go. I stand gratefully corrected.

Edward is one of my oldest friends. His father died three weeks ago, and he has just come back from burying him in Spain. I met his father just once, at a champagne tasting organised by Edward seven years ago. I don’t remember the fizz, but I remember his father. His life held many secret passages, barely known, if at all, by his wife and sons.

Early in the war he was in British Naval Intelligence. Later he worked on the Manhattan Project as a young nuclear physicist. He dismissed questions about either with a curt “Classified” right up to this year. In the Fifties he married Edward’s mother, radiant daughter of the nineteenth century textile barons who inspired Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga. They were suspicious of this marry-in: too clever by half, and worse, half-Indian. Edward regards their ignorance as the failure of money just a few generations old: the established aristocracy had always survived by transfusions of bright young blood.

In the Sixties he ran a nightclub in Chelsea. Edward remembers a childhood home next-door to Diana Spencer’s London house. There was a private plane, a Rolls to drop him off at state school. The source of funds was not always clear, but living large was the only way. At seventeen Edward bumped into his parents at Annabel’s, Mark Birley’s famous London nightclub, and found his mother wearing full evening dress with flip-flops. Around this time his father became a celebrity divorce lawyer, sorting things out for John Lennon and Cynthia and dissolving Elton John’s early experiments in hetrosexuality. Sadly, he never gossiped.

After his wife’s death he moved to a James Bond-style bachelor flat in the Temple, near his legal chambers. He continued to practise as a barrister. One of his last cases was a pro-bono defence of the MacDonald’s Two, the couple who were sued by the burger people for handing out anti-fast-food propaganda.

Edward is planning a memorial service in the spring. The format for old legal bores is very fixed, he says: the service must start at 5.45 pm on the dot, and the speakers follow a waffling protocol. Instead Edward is sorting through the evidence, trying to find ambassadors from distant segments of his father’s life to deliver their own portraits, evoking, he hopes, a crusty “I say!” or two. It’s not easy task to piece this life together. The man’s pleasure was conspiracy thrillers, and though though he drank enough to pickle a lesser liver, he never spilled secrets. May he rest in peace.

Irish and UK readers, check out “Iran Undercover: Inside the Hidden Revolution” on Channel 4 tomorrow night (Tuesday) at 10.40 pm. Interesting stuff, not least because it includes an interview with Shirin Ebadi, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, conducted by my best pal, who lives in Tehran.

Seventy per cent of the population of Iran is under 30. They’re well-educated, men and women alike. Those are the demographics of revolution.