JULIAN COLE worries that he might be turning into a Bobo...

SURVIVING the Eighties without a mobile phone or a Filofax, I think I escaped being a Yuppie - especially as these accessories are still missing from my life. Besides, you had to be go-getting and wealthy to be a Yuppie, as well as metropolitan. By the end of the Eighties I had go-got myself to York, where I have stayed, like people do.

Having side-stepped Yuppiedom, I like to think there is no other category to contain me. Sadly, these days we all fit into some box or other. And I've just discovered that I might be a Bobo.

The full name for this new social group is the Bourgeois Bohemians, a category identified by American social commentator David Brookes, who explores the phenomenon in his new book, Bobos In Paradise.

The Bobo, apparently, melds two established but previously distinct groups of people - the bourgeois and the bohemians. The first were grey, church-going employees of big corporations; the second were artists, intellectuals and free-thinkers.

This new social group is said to be a reaction against materialist Yuppies. This new breed is rich and powerful - great, that gets me off - and likes green politics, coffee-house culture and poetry readings. Oh, dear. Greens often talk sense, I've read a poem or two, and coffee houses are great places to hang out. But matters are about to get more alarming still...

The Bobo works in the Internet or media, drives an old car, makes bread, buys organic or free-range food, shops at GAP and rides a mountain bike.

Oh, no - a hit on just about every one. Bread-making is a long-time hobby. In fact there is finest organic flour in these veins, rather than blood. Working in the media, yes. Shopping at GAP, er, yes again. Organic and free-range, well some of the time. My car is definitely old and as for the bike, well I bought one the other week. Now it isn't a mountain bike, as there weren't many mountains in York the last time I looked, but it is definitely a bike.

Apparently, the Bobo likes to holiday in the Loire Valley. Well, I would like to. But money was tight this year, so we went to Scotland instead.

Now if you don't mind, I'm going to discover my new Bobo self. I can't stand around here all day. There is organic bread to bake, a bike to ride, an old car to drive, my job in the media to pursue, and I haven't been in GAP for at least a week, and there's nearly always something I fancy there. On the sale rails, of course.