Someone's nicked the Skoda badge off my car. A hoodie with a sense of irony?

It became known in my mind as "The Strange Affair of the Skoda Badge". One Friday last month I was deputised to drive my ten-year-old son and one of his friends to a party. I drove to the boy's house, parked nearby and walked with my son to collect him. As the three of us returned to the car, my son took his friend aside and made a formal-sounding announcement: "You should know that my dad drives a Skoda." He obviously felt it was important to confront this embarrassment directly, given that his friend's dad drives . . . well, I don't know the make exactly, but something big and silver-coloured with satellite navigation. In any case, the friend took the news well and, after a dutiful chuckle, changed the subject.

A week later, I noticed that the Skoda badge on the front of our car had been removed. My first thought was that it had been taken by some hooded youth as a sort of ironic trophy, but after thinking it over for a while, I suggested to my son that he himself might have removed the badge in order to create ambiguity about the car's make. He denied it flatly, pointing out that there was still a Skoda badge on the back of the car and reminding me that this badge had simply dropped off some months earlier and been replaced during a service. Any jury would have acquitted him.

And I don't think he did it, because his shame about our car does not run very deep. He does not see Skoda ownership as being a function of our social class, but simply as a peculiar financial decision that I have made. As far as he is concerned, I might redeem myself at any minute. I could sell the Skoda and buy a different car; or I could buy a Moto Guzzi motorbike, for example, and park it alongside the Skoda, thus balancing things out. My son and his friends seem to see society as a series of opportunities to spend money, and these opportunities can be taken well or badly. The nearest they come to any understanding of "working class" is in the concept of "the chav". A chav, to them, is a person who, for his own odd reasons, chooses to spend his money on white sportswear and pit bull terriers.

If I introduced my son and his contemporaries to a man who lived in a small room and simply never spent money, apart from on the essentials of life, they would have no means of determining his status. He would be invisible to them. They would not seek to find out what kind of school he'd been to or what his parents did for a living. They would not think of listening closely to his accent in order to discover class nuances.

My son and his friends are in fact much less class conscious than I was at that age 30 years ago; they are, however, more materialistic _ and that's the Thatcher-Blair legacy in a nutshell. It's not that they don't have idealism, but their idealism is not expressed in domestic social terms. Instead, they wear "Live Strong" bands, expressing the hope that cancer will come to an end (and that Lance Armstrong will win the Tour de France one more time), or "Make Poverty History" bands. These change hands at inflated prices in the playground, and some kids have grown quite rich in schoolboy terms by selling on Make Poverty History bands, so you can see that they're well named.

The new, classless materialism extends to many adults. I became involved in a conversation at a drinks party with some vaguely new Labour types who were discussing whether shoppers at Sainsbury's and Tesco might have different life expectancies. I said, "It's all a matter of class, isn't it?" - and there was a disapproving silence. It's achievement of a kind to have destroyed the rigid snobberies of yesteryear, and to have replaced them with a more mutable hierarchy based entirely on money, but it's nothing for anyone to be self-righteous about.

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