Inspired by John Goldthorpe's claim that downward social mobility is increasing, the Times (£) and Guardian have reported on individuals' experiences of social mobility.

In this context, I am a pin-up boy for upward mobility. I was the first person in my family to get any educational qualifications at all. And within a few years I went from a single-parent family in inner-city Leicester, via grammar school and Oxford, to a well-paid job with my own flat in a posh part of London. I am the sort of thing the Milburn commission wants to encourage.

My personal experience, however, is that there are big costs to this mobility. Even if you escape your class, the scars remain. Here are four:

- Being an outsider. This began at grammar school. The school was on the other side of Leicester - are grammar schools always in the expensive parts of cities? - and it played rugby, not football. Both were signals that the likes of me did not belong. And this remained the case. Although I experienced no overt hostility from the many posh people I met at university and work - if anything, the opposite - there was always a sense that their interests were not mine, and that it was me that was out of step, not them.

- Closing off one's options. It was not until I was in my 30s that the thought of working in journalism occurred to me; I went to work in the City simply because it was expanding in the 80s and jobs were available. It was not until I was 40 that I thought I could play a musical instrument; my school was only an exam factory. Coming from a poor background teaches you to get what you can, not what you want.

- Ambition. When a teacher told me I could get into Oxford - and ther idea of going to university never occurred to me before then - my immediate reaction was: "hey, I can show posh people I'm as good as them". By my late 20s, however, ambition just died. As Sathnam Sanghera says, coming from a poor family teaches you that £30,000 a year is a lot of money. Why bust a gut to pay for expensive holidays or big houses that you don't want, or trying to impress people who don't really care about you? Once the fear of becoming homeless died, I had nothing left to strive for.

- Relationships. I have never had a long-term relationship. One reason for this is that being upwardly mobile propelled me into male-dominated environments. Also, for me, the gender divide is also a class divide. I honestly don't think that, in my adult life, I've ever met a woman from my kind of background. Women, like posh men, have generally regarded me as a curiosity. That's not the basis for a long-term relationship.

Now, I appreciate that all this might be at least a little solipsistic and idiosyncratic; certainly, I suspect younger readers will wonder what I'm on about. And perhaps there's a form of egocentric bias going on; maybe I'm blaming class for what are in fact personal failings. As I say, I am an outsider.

Or maybe not. What I'm suggesting here is that there are, in the words of Sennett and Cobb's great book, hidden injuries of class which social mobility cannot cure. From my perspective, mobility is no substitute for social equality.