Meet the 'in-betweeners': How to prove your social status

Timing is everything

(Getty Images)

Many city-dwellers like escaping to the countryside of a weekend - there’s nothing like whizzing through fields on the train, leaving the pollution and mugginess of the city behind, disembarking and taking a lungful of genuinely fresh air.

But if you really want to show off your status as someone who divides their time between the country and city, you need to be in the rural world by Friday morning - and, crucially, prove it by posting an Instagram, preferably of a dewy field.

(The dew is crucial as it proves you were there early in the morning.)

Only then can you really be deemed an “in-betweener.”

These are people who are self-employed and can thus spend half the week in the city and half at their other home in the countryside. And it is very much a status symbol.

In-betweeners look down on weekenders - those people who arrive in the countryside on Friday evening at the earliest, how embarrassing.

And full-time countryside dwellers largely respect in-betweeners too - they are welcomed as part of the community, unlike weekenders who merely come for a jolly then go back to their real lives.

Weekenders do not receive invitations to countryside dinner parties, tennis games or bridge clubs, The Times points out, because they don’t contribute to the local community.

But how to spot an in-betweener?

Aside from their Instagram habits, in-betweeners have a particular style. A man might wear a sweater full of moth-holes - inevitable given the big old house in which he resides.

A woman might wear Manolo Blahnik heels in London but old flats in the countryside. Rather than a perfect manicure, her nails might be a bit chipped from her time spent tending to her garden (naturally in-betweeners grow their own veg and have their own chickens).

As for work, in-betweeners always run their own businesses, hence their flexibility - they might be the chairman of a bank or own a media company.

But once they’re in the countryside, life will be spent lambing, shopping at local organic delis and doing yoga. And there’ll be a dog sleeping on their sofa too (only ever the sofa).

Famous in-betweeners include Liz Earle, Elizabeth Hurley and Alice Temperley.

In-betweeners can take the train back and forth between their abodes, but only ever at off-peak times. God forbid they travel at rush hour with the rest of us.