Have you noticed what’s happened to the daiquiri? It’s been reinvented, by the Teen Literati. Now it doesn’t seem fair to blame the Industrial Revolution for what happened to the daiquiri, or to Writing in Australia in the 1990s, but the Industrial Revolution started it – you know, the steam engine, World Wars, radiation poisoning, filter-­tipped cigarettes, Mickey Mouse, germ-free hamburgers, and air travel holidays for the working family. And the Industrial Revolution was kick-started by the bourgeoisie. That’s right: you people, the middle class.

You invented it, you kept up with the maintenance and the home improvements, and I know it wasn’t easy: the construction and populating of the vast, scattered, and bewildering country of Suburbia, the restless perfection of the Assembly Line, the kinky idea of clothes that decorate and strangle: the necktie for men and the bra for women.

The middle class. Cranky Karl Marx and his spoilt wife came from that class. So did Mao Zedong and Jane Austen and Fidel Castro and Virginia Woolf and the Red Brigades and Patty Hearst. Even Clark Kent, who came from a dirt-poor background, wore a suit and a necktie to work.