SOCIAL climbing is far from dead, it seems. While owning a hostess trolley was de rigueur in the Seventies, having big shoulder pads so wide you had to walk sideways through doors was the sign you’d made it in the Eighties.

And in the Nineties – the early years at least – you were really somebody if you walked round with a mobile phone the size of a house brick. The fact you knackered your shoulder while okay-yah-ing into it while you held it to your ear was but a small price to pay.

As for the Noughties – you were nothing if you didn’t swan around flaunting your abs in designer Lycra, a sure sign that the fitness explosion had well and truly taken off. Only those who had aggressively gym-ed their way to svelteness got to parade their success on the school run and down the supermarket aisle, leaving the rest of us to slouch around in our baggy jumpers.

But now, today, you’ve really made it, you’ve well and truly reached the top of the social-climbing mountain if you have – wait for it - bed sheets with at least a 400 thread count. We can all say we sleep on those can’t we? Because how would anyone know unless we all threw open our doors and allowed the masses to troop from bedroom to bedroom on an Egyptian cotton bedding inspection walkabout?

While a high count of your bedding threads might be deemed to be a sign you’ve made it – according to a ridiculous survey by a home improvement company - it’s hardly a sign of conspicuous consumption of wealth.

Much more the thing is the fact you’ve got a garden big enough for a ride-on lawnmower. Add to that having a driveway at least 200 yards long, then you’ve clearly found your place in the world.

Or maybe you shop at Waitrose, have an Aga and a conservatory. And I don’t mean one of those lean-to jobs you can buy at garden centres either. No, your ‘I’ve made it!’ statement is a conservatory with aluminium bi-fold doors that contains half your kitchen, not some place where you freeze to death in winter and sweat your way through the Daily Express in the summer.

You’ve most likely got a holiday home too, and you’ve flown first class at least once to get to it, taking your designer luggage with you. And when you’re not on holiday the kids go to private school, and have pony riding lessons that their nanny takes them to because you’re too busy watching TV on your bigger than 55 inches screen.

And if you’re not doing that, you’re showering in your wet room after winning in straight sets down at the local tennis club where you’ve been a member for years. There again, you might just as easily done your workout in the home gym.

You’re on first name terms with the vicar as well as the landlord of your local gastro pub, where you’ve so made it that you don’t actually need to eat the excellent food there but just drop in for a drink, because the chef often pops over to cook for you personally…

When you’re not sitting on your favourite bar stool at your favourite spot at the bar, flashing your pristine riding boots and your bum in size eight designer jodhpurs that have been nowhere near a saddle, you’re off to the golf club – where you’ve got a handicap of under 15 - or heading out on sailing weekends.

Failing that you’re rubbing shoulders with other Made Its in the silver ring at your local racecourse. And if it happens to be Ascot, so much the better…

Wherever it is you’ll get there in the car you have for mainly weekend use that naturally bears a personalised number plate. And you’ve probably got a wicker picnic hamper in the back with a dressed lobster resting on ice bricks that you got out of the fridge freezer complete with pull-out drawers and an ice cube dispenser.

Once you’re back home you’ll wind down from your gruelling day spent holding a Champagne flute, in front of the log-burner, watching that giant TV screen again, before getting ready for bed in a bathroom with his and hers sinks.

You’ll climb into those 400-plus thread count sheets and before you settle down, upload yet more pictures from your latest foreign holiday onto your Facebook page, and Tweet night-night inanities to your 2,000-plus Twitter followers.

And if that’s what having made it is all about, give me cut price supermarket bedding any night of the week…