I saw someone on Twitter ask a question during the week which was ‘What were some things people had that marked them out as rich/posh to you when you were younger?’

The replies were things such as having a fridge with an ice dispenser built in to it, a driveway and owning a purebred dog rather than a mongrel. It got me thinking about my own childhood and the things I thought were signifiers of wealth.

When I was about six or seven, me and my maw moved from a council flat in Garthamlock to a council house in Springboig. It felt to me like we were moving into a mansion. My God, I thought upon seeing our new home for the first time, we’ve got a front and back garden! Stairs! Three bedrooms! It was mind-blowing to me. We had made it. This was it, this was the good life. I soon found that our abode paled in comparison to those of my new pals I made at school. I became pally with a wee guy who stayed in Mount Vernon. ‘Mount Vernon!’ exclaimed my maw when I told her where I was going. ‘He must come fae money.’ I thought nothing of it really, he seemed normal to me. That all changed when I got to his house. Walking in, and this is hard to explain, but it smelled like the home of a rich person. All flowery and clean. His front door was much heavier than mine, with ornate designs on the glass panels. The carpets felt much thicker and bouncier under my feet. Heading up the stair with him, his room was easily twice the size of mine and he had a double bed as well as a wee two-seater couch in front of his telly. ‘This is amazing, man,’ I said to him, feeling completely over-awed and even intimidated by the opulence. ‘Aye, it’s awrite,’ he said nonchalantly. He loaded up his Playstation and handed me a controller. I glanced over at the tower of games he had. All the latest, brand-new releases. They even worked, unlike mine. My Playstation was procured off a guy in the pub by my granda and was ‘chipped’ so it could play pirated games. They either never loaded up at all or froze mid-game. This wee guy was living my dream and I started to hate him for it, I was absolutely seething with jealousy.

His maw shouted us down for dinner an hour or so later. The kitchen had an ‘island’, something I hadn’t seen before. However, I did notice that they didn’t seem to have a pulley so they went down in my estimation for that. In the corner of the kitchen was a dining table. Something I realised I had never eaten at before. I sat down and wondered if this was going to be like an American family dinner like I’d seen in films and they’d say a grace before we could eat. There was no such formality, thankfully. I picked up my shining silver fork and was stunned at how heavy it was. They even had better forks than us. The plate weighed a ton as well. I must have looked like an alien to my pal and his parents as I examined everything around about me, unsure what to do. The spoon lying next to my fork seemed to me like a mistake but then I saw them all using to twirl their spaghetti. My head almost exploded.

I got home and recounted my experience to my maw who laughed a lot. It ignited a kind of burning desire within me to become as loaded as possible. I wanted thick carpets and heavy doors in my massive hoose. I wanted cutlery and plates that weighed a ton. I wanted two toilets and a BMW in the driveway outside. I wanted to eat my dinner at a dining table using a spoon even though it seemed ridiculous. I soon grew out of this as I realised that despite my pal’s obviously high standard of living and extreme luxury, he didn’t seem to be as happy or enthused about it all as I thought he should have been.

This country’s obsession with class is strange and leads us to believe certain misconceptions about others, no matter where we ourselves fall on the spectrum. I often wonder what category I fall into now that I’m a writer. Despite being as skint as I’ve ever been, I’m hardly out grafting like the rest of my family. I’m in a sort of grey area where my working-class pals see me as a card-carrying member of the glitzy literati and where my fellow writers, many of them very middle-class, see me as a sort of caveman. I can’t say for definite whether I’d be much happier if I was loaded, but I do know that I’d go daft with money if I had the chance, spend the lot on the heaviest set of cutlery I could find, so it’s probably for the best that I live up to the struggling writer trope for the next wee while at least.