It’s easy to judge. We look at people and make assumptions about them. We take people at face value, and jump to conclusions. We assign generalizations to the way they look, dress or choose to embellish their appearance.

When I was young I was taught that anyone with a tattoo was a thug or ex-army. I wouldn’t describe my wife and daughter as either.

But these stereotypes stick. Sometimes with grave consequences. They can lead to bullying, misogyny, racism or even medical misdiagnosis.

It is amazing how easy it is to get things wrong. Fortunately, when it happened to me, the consequences were minimal. But let me tell you my story and you can be the judge.

We were a typical working class family. My dad worked as a messenger in a bank. When we were old enough, my mum pitched in by getting a part-time job at the local Boots. We certainly weren’t rich, but we were comfortable.

When I was ten, my dad got homesick and the whole family packed our bags and moved to Malta. It wasn’t a smart financial move. My parents sold our house in West London just before the property boom. They got a relative pittance for it.

When we got to Malta my father was in and out of employment, draining the family savings. He resorted to returning to England to work while we stayed in Malta. And then he fell ill.

My father passed away a year and a half later. We were living in a small rental property. My mother was on a small pension that wasn’t enough to keep things going.

My big sister had just started working so she helped mum out financially. My brother was studying to become a doctor and I was still in high school. We earned a small student stipend and gave most of it to mum to help make ends meet. My younger sister was still in secondary school.

The funny thing was that most of my mates at school assumed that we were well off. All of us spoke very good English. In Malta, at the time, that usually meant you were upper working class, middle class, or better. In our case it is because we spent our childhood in England. And that our parents always emphasised the importance of education.

We were never starving. We always had food to eat. But we could not afford luxuries. I used to walk 6km (4 miles) to meet my friends on a Saturday night to save on the bus fare. If I didn’t manage to get a ride back I would walk. I bought the cheapest plain T-shirts I could find and painted funny designs on them. My drawing wasn’t any good. So I kept the designs simple, but at least the captions were funny. Then I would brag that I didn’t like designer clothes because I wanted to be unique.

I tore the only decent pair of jeans I had. So I painted lips around the tear to make it seem deliberate. Little did I know that torn jeans would become a thing years later.

Eventually I dropped out of University and got a job. My brother qualified as a doctor and things got better. He had missed a whole year at Uni because he was recovering from a terrible accident. It wasn’t his fault and a few years later he bought a house with the insurance money.

A few years ago I was quite surprised when he went into politics for a short while. He still prefers to speak in English and he was misjudged too. I heard comments that because he was a doctor and had a decent house he couldn’t understand working-class folk.

Little did they know.

*shout out to the song with the same title released by the trio Imagination in 1982

This blog is the eleventh in a series of 30 leading up to my sixtieth birthday.  Thanks for getting this far. Please consider subscribing to my blog to keep up to date with my posts.

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