By Catharine Portland -


Posh blokes, you can spot them a mile off. Well-dressed and 'fah-fah'ing their way around town. Why go near them? It's worth a try.

Dating a posh bloke is fraught with danger, and not just talking about showing yourself up by not knowing what knife to use at dinner. The well-bred are a breed onto themselves and most women are quite sensibly and keep away. Not me.

There are a couple of traps you face when dating a guy with a public school demeanour, and not just the fact that going to an all boys school they have no idea about women –although don't all men have no idea? Anyway, there are traps and I seemed to fall into them when I was dating Hugh.

Hugh always worth a suit, his hair was always in a mess and we mostly had a laugh together. However, the pitfalls still remained.

The first is you try to fit in with his mates. Suddenly, without me realising it, my diction started to become clear and I would nod knowingly as they talked about polo – apparently not just a mint – and heading off on the yacht. This is fine until they ask your opinion and it's hard to fake it.

You end up being too scared to say anything – even "this wine is nice" is a danger as the posh boy's opinion is "blackcurrant undertones clearly define it as being from Alsace".

So what did I do? Switched to completely the opposite. I became 'common as muck' girl, the rich man's bit of rough. I tried to revel in a cockney accent and general commonness, slurping down wine, pretending to be Barbara Windsor and letting everyone know I went to a comprehensive, even though I didn't.

Eventually when I learnt just to be me, things were a little more plane sailing. That's when I learnt a good accent and education don't really mean much.

When I first went to visit Hugh's family I was expecting a country pile, with dogs, acres and a gardener. What I found was a larger than average Home Counties house, which was pretty ordinary. Yes, he did call his mother "Mummy", but there was no cook and I had to help his father load the dishwasher after dinner.

My mate Emma, however, managed to lock horns with a bugger. The initial attraction was just physical – a good rugby-toned body. However, along with rugby always goes drinking. When they went out to the pub together he was ok, but in a crowd he turned into a big-voiced drunkard, who measured a good night out on how many moonies he had pulled, how many pints he could down in one and the power of his belching.

Also with the lads, he thought it was fine to generally treat her like muck, not because of any class difference, but because she was a woman. His excuse for lifting her skirt up when she stood or telling the pub what they were going home to do was "it's just a laugh".

Her only regret was that she couldn't dump him as spectacularly as he showed her up.

My dalliance with the upper classes did teach me one thing. I had class and I didn't have to pretend. Also a prat is a prat, no matter how well he dresses or if he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.


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