They managed to cling on to their terraced house through the Great Depression and got through World War 2 with all their children surviving. They saw them all married off bar one, and at war’s end, through the kind of thrift that borders on miserliness, they had scraped enough together to move two doors down into ‘The Shop’.

The shop was the same as their old house, except it had a big window in the front parlour, which was now stocked with bread and milk, sweets and cigs, cheese and butter and bacon, and tins of everything. My grandparents had definitely climbed a smidgen above the rest of the street that ran from the steelworks to Century Oils.

A very slender social and economic smidgen, but a perceptible rise in status nonetheless, and one that had to be recognized and maintained.

So when my grandfather promptly keeled over dead from a heart attack and left my grandmother to face the new National Health Service on her own, she was adamant. If it was free, it couldn’t be any good. Not good enough for someone of her newly-earned class, anyway.

They had begrudged every penny they’d paid the local doctor. They had consistently complained of the treatment he provided (the result of a permanent state of tipsiness, said this family of teetotallers).

But offered a health service that they could access for free (well, free if you discounted the cost of the insurance stamps they had to buy from the shop’s takings whether they used the service or not), Grandma and Auntie Doris perversely insisted on ‘going private’.

At any illness, they first had to go down to the phone box on the corner of Portland Street to make an appointment. At the duly appointed time, they put on their Sunday best and went to see the same doctor that they could have seen on the National Health. Except they never had to wait more than few minutes and that waiting took place in the passageway between front door and surgery and not in the common waiting room that everyone else entered through the back door.

As a kid prone to ask embarrassing questions, it didn’t take me long to figure out that what Grandma and Auntie Doris were buying was not a superior standard of care, but middle-class respectability.

I suspect the same is true with the 30-baht Universal Coverage scheme in Thailand.

The mostly yellow middle classes would hate it merely for the fact that Thaksin introduced it and so earned himself the loyalty of legions of the underclass, some of whom would be dead today without it. And many of them will be covered by the civil service scheme (that is funded at almost 10 times more per head) or private insurance they pay for themselves, so they don’t have to use it. But they wouldn’t want to use it themselves anyway.

One argument is based on the same issue of quality that I heard whenever my questions became too persistent for Grandma to ignore. If it costs only 30 baht, it can’t be worth much. Sadly, because of low and iniquitous funding, this is becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But I suspect the real reason is the need for the middle classes to demonstrate that they are middle-class. And you can’t do that if you are waiting to see the doctor in a room crowded with all sorts. All lower sorts, especially.

They pass money under the table to ensure their kids spend their school years mixing only with their social peers (or betters); they rent the more expensive sala at the wat for their funerals and 5-star ballrooms for their weddings (even if the groom has to tear open the gift envelopes in the hotel toilet to pay the bill). And they drive, or at least use the skytrain and underground, so that they don’t have to rub commuting shoulders with the hoi polloi.

Which may explain why I get away with taking the free buses that the government has gifted the people of Bangkok. The sign on the front says these are provided ‘from the taxpayer’, and the tax burden in this country falls disproportionately on the middle classes.

These buses are not intended for the likes of me. I can afford the 7 or 8 baht fare for a regular bus. But no member of the middle class complains when I clamber aboard and, quite literally, take them for a ride.

Because nobody from the middle classes would be seen dead on a free bus. They’re all back there at the skytrain station, waiting with the ghosts of Grandma and Auntie Doris for the privilege of paying.

About author: Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).