With the summer holiday season upon us, we're putting the Friday question on hold, and instead using these lovely last days of the week to treat you to some more classics of middle-class telly. Patricia Routledge's performance in Alan Bennett's A Lady Of Letters is not only a marvel of modern TV, but also the subject of a fierce debate among mc-tv watchers, as you can see from the comments on You Tube. Was this, or Victoria Wood's Kitty, the inspiration for Roy Clarke's Hyancinth Bouquet? 

Theresa May's hint that the new Government might dispense with ASBOs, signalled another big break with the culture of the New Labour years. The ASBO became iconic, with various adoptions and parodies in popular culture, some quite horrific. In class terms, it belonged to those years when then the media thought the working class was splitting, being siphoned off into lower-middle- and underclasses; at the time (2005), the Middle Class Handbook even (humorously) suggested that everyone in Britain could now be regarded as middle class.  

Of course this was not true, but there was a point in that the polticians and media had become very unsure of what if anything now constituted "working class", and they more or less stopped using the term.  Although ASBOs were in fact handed out from anyone to middle-class political activists to pensioners who drove their mobility scooters in a dangerous manner, they became, like "chav", one of the words public figures, and middle-class people could use to mean "poor and unpleasant people I don't really want my children to play with."

The "white working class" came back into the debate a couple of years ago when they stopped voting Labour, though middle class folk are often still a bit queasy about the wc word. It will be interesting, in the coalition's new Big Society era, to see what, if any, new terms emerge. RB

The news that the YouTube track Newport (Ymerodraeth State of Mind), might soon be in the official pop charts comes as a great comfort to me, because Its popularity suggests that I'm not alone in wanting to puke every time (and there are many times) I see/hear a drunk hen party or flock of posh festival-going morons throwing their heads back and baa-ing "New York! Concrete jungle where dreams are made, OH! [don't you hate songs in which the writer had to insert an "oh" or something just to make it rhyme?] There's nothing you can't DO now you're in New York!" Invariably these groups of idiots bawl out the words as if they were infected with the same patriotic fervour as Alicia herself, but why? Are you from New York? And even if you were, don't you find it corny and weird to sing along as if it's the greatest place on earth, when if there was a song like that about Paris or London or Glasgow, you'd be making sarcastic comments about these places being dumps? Why is it that British people buy into Americans' belief that singing about something automatically makes it the best in the world? 

Of course New York's a great city. But like anywhere else it has its bad sides, and the annoying thing is that while other singer-songwriters would feel compelled to acknowledge this, Alicia bats it away with "Even if it ain't all it seems, I got a pocket full of dreams, Baby I'm from New York." NYPD's notorious fake crime figures? Never mind, Alicia's "gonna make it by any means"! Someone sleeping tonight with (possibly the worst lyric of the century so far) "a  hunger far more than an empty fridge"? No matter, the streets will make YOU feel BRAND NEW!

You could go on forever analysing why this is such a terrible piece of music, and that's before you even get to smug stage-school-y Alicia herself, who is now the modern equivalent of Luther Vandross or George Benson in their crap periods. But the really depressing thing for a British person is less the song and singer than the alcopopped idiots yodelling it across the land on Saturday night; they were even at it at Glastonbury, during Stevie Wonder's cover version. It's not the British way, this. The British way is to be witty and self-deprecating, which is why we have the excellent Newport, as well as versions for Glasgow and North Wales. Watch and learn, yodellers, watch and learn. Country Guy

As a waitress in an upmarket restaurant in a Cornish coastal town popular with tourists, I always try to make a visit to our restaurant as enjoyable for children as I can. After all, it’s doubtful they’ve had a say in being dragged out in their gladrags to sit still on a chair. But recently, a new snobbery has taken over restaurants making my life much harder –the ostentatious refusal of the children’s menu.

One day last week, a mother waltzed in with her small boy. It was late, she was carrying a laptop case and he was still in school uniform.  As standard, I offered her the children’s menu but after violently batting it away, she ordered two ultra-healthy adult main courses – something with butternut squash. As the boy stared wistfully at another table’s chicken nuggets I thought, “poor kid” – but the mum hadn’t noticed. Surely this image isn’t worth it?

But it’s not just working mums trying to prove something. Large mixed family parties and nuclear families of four are favoring the more mature menu for their kiddiwinks. The mothers usually make all the decisions however, as their husbands sit there trying to go unnoticed, flushing scarlet. But you can almost read their minds; “just give him some bloody baked beans if that’s what the little lad wants!”

Upon ordering, any wobbler can be dealt with. I’ve heard many a mother hiss something like “darling you’ll LIKE it - I promise. It’s like what you had the other day.” Unfortunately, as I clear away half a pound of artichokes on a plate, I note this evidently isn’t true.

While the “5-a-day” boom of the noughties, or even Jamie Ol’s school dinners spruce-up,  may have something to do with this craze, it seems the main snobbery over the children’s menu is far simpler. The middle classes like to project the image that their child has a finer palette than YOURS, which they will eagerly build on the more trips out to restaurants they take.

I think this snobbery needs to stop – children have their whole lives to acquire the taste for olives and capers. There’s no harm in letting your kids eat from the children’s menu once in a while.  Adults can go to a restaurant and sink 5 bottles of Pinot Grigio, but kids can’t have the odd plate of alphabetti spaghetti? Has the world gone mad? Jessica Mayne 

"It's really hard to explain. I don't know, it's just something I'm crazy enough to enjoy," Curtis McHenry, an 18-year-old American high-school graduate queuing to buy Starcraft 2, told a reporter. "Everyone else thinks it's crazy. . . I love doing stuff like this. The people you meet – there's nothing else like it."

Curtis was not talking about Starcraft 2 itself. He was explaining why he was queuing outside a shop to buy a product when he could have simply downloaded it at home. It was a good question, and an illuminating answer for anyone who has wondered why certain shops and products now routinely attract huge queues when the product can easily be bought elsewhere. Obviously such queues can be rather staged in collusion with the press; they hype it up, the store restricts numbers of people allowed in, the press gets good pictures. They may well have learned this from the Noughties Harry Potter mania, with all those midnight queues outside Waterstones.

But as Curtis points out, aside from that, there is also a genuine enthusiasm for being part of a group of people coming together around an event or a brand that they all like. It may seem strange that at a time when pubs and social organisations are closing down, there can be such a coming-togethers around well-branded new electronic products and fashion products, but that's just life, isn't it? "Crazy", as Curtis says.