Mrs X: "I had a nasty turn last week [...] I thought I should faint or something."

Johnstone comments: "Mrs X is attempting to raise her status."

My anaysis would be: Mrs X is fishing for a "stroke", the way you'd fish for compliments. It is a ploy to manipulate others in her group into a particular self-esteem transation, namely commiseration. She expects something like "Oh, you poor thing. What happened, did you have to go to the hospital?"

Mrs Y: "You're lucky to have been going to a cinema."

Johnstone analyzes Mrs Y as "blocking" Mrs X, and I'd tend to agree - this move denies the request for a stroke. There's a subtext, too, that Mrs X is something of a spoiled child: that she has an inflated estimation of herself.

I could go on to analyze the rest of the dialogue in that vein, but for me there's little value in saying the same thing except using "self-esteem" instead of "status", that's just fighting over definitions.

More interesting is the idea that everything Johnstone refers to are fleeting components of status, whereas there are attested long-lasting components (class, power, prestige) and the connotations of the term "status" tend to conflate all these components.