I spend an average of one week a year in my home city of London and often wonder why I don’t miss the overcrowded anthill. I occasionally pine for a walk in Richmond Park or a leisurely stroll down the Kings Road but, truth be told, the further I am from Britain, the happier I am. Why?

Overcrowding, filthy air, hooliganism, crime, drunkenness, obesity, ignorance, those sad, plain, embittered faces, the outrageous costs of ordinary items, dead end consumerism, Islamic extremism, the sense that every attraction or museum is designed to rip you off...  

One of the things I detested the most about Britain is the strange class system and the suppositions behind it. I don’t mean the conventional Michael Caine rant about snobbery against cockneys or anything like that. The reverse, actually.

I got sick and tired of people in pubs defining me based on a slender acquaintance. Here’s a small selection. "You don’t speak with an English accent". "I suppose you live in Hampstead". "You obviously come from a good background". "You must be very well educated".

Actually, most of these assumptions are untrue. Firstly, I do consider that I speak with an English accent. What they mean is that I have deliberately eschewed the ‘mockney’ accent so popular with my peers. Also, I never lived in Hampstead, although I wish I had. True, my education was in private schools but I was never the most conscientious pupil.

People just assume because you can string a sentence together and don’t drop your aitches that you must be privileged. And what does it mean to "come from a good background"? Did John Hervey, 7th Marquess of Bristol, come "from a good background"? You Google him and then tell me. It’s all meaningless drivel, based purely on accent.

Of course, a good background is one where you are loved and valued and you have enough to serve your basic needs. It definitely helps to have a good education but respect and love constitute the best upbringing in themselves; the rest is icing on the cake.

At the core of these strange misconceptions is the fact that everyone in Britain dumbs down, not up. It’s a bid to pretend we’re classless. Nowadays if we hear Celia Johnson in that classic movie Brief Encounter most people would laugh. Strangulated vowels and cut glass English is no longer spoken except among elderly Brits in deepest Sussex.

The likes of London mayor Boris Johnson and actor Hugh Grant are accepted because they became figures of fun. They consciously played up to the archetypal English ‘silly arse’ type of caricature. But most of the time people who are well spoken are derided. Class hatred is still the most permanent form of prejudice in Britain and it goes both ways.

I get annoyed by Estuary English because I think it’s an affectation appeasing society’s demands that you don’t stand out. I long to turn on British television and hear the English of Joanna Lumley, Edward Stourton and the much missed Carol Barnes.

I long to talk to someone in a British institution who articulates clearly and calls me Hershman, not ‘ershman. If that is itself a form of snobbery, I suppose I must, with a heavy sigh, plead guilty but it used to be just a form of courtesy to express yourself clearly. I guess that categorises me as an old fogie.