If you're the creative, artsy one who goes off to study painting or filmmaking, you're often seen as an outsider partly because traditionally, it has never been seen as a way to have a career.
I think that one way of diffusing an insult is to turn it around and laugh at yourself - that's a way of coping with it - and another is to just ignore it.
In Britain, class is a neurosis. You judge people from the moment they open their mouth and start speaking: what their accent represents in terms of where they were educated, what part of the country they're from, what kind of class background they have.
There's a sense of knowing when to stop and take a break from things, to step back from the work you're making, and of changing things up to keep them interesting for yourself.
The contortions and games of identity that politicians play on themselves almost everyday is kind of extraordinary. Trump, for instance, speaks like a five-year-old in these vague generalities but then also makes out that he's an expert on everything; he's trying to have his cake and eat it. He's someone who is pretending that he's for the working person but comes from this enormously privileged background.
