the plot unthickens

At our office Christmas party a couple of weeks ago, someone, once again, brought up recession. I regretted, at the time, immediately blurting out that I refused to realise it, personally. What a stupid thing to say. My workmates looked on, shocked at my selfishness. I blushed, gulped some wine and muddled something out about being in a position to help.

A little more thought before speaking is something I have always resolved to work on. Must try harder.

I have now had time to put my thoughts into proper order and so have rewritten the scene, embellished the truth and twisted time to a more satisfactory scriptual outcome.

I object to being dragged into a cloud of murky gloom by the dragging negativity that consumes media output. Why? Because I am young, single (no, not in that way, David), qualified, mobile, independent (financially, at least), I have negligible savings, no real responsibilities and a decent income.

I am, in short, in a position to help. I can keep spending, albeit in the same relatively unluxurious way as before (London always was, for me, an expensive city), I can eat out from time to time, I can try to stay positive and upbeat. I will still take holidays, I will still see gigs and plays and I will shop at my local shops. Nothing much will change, except that I no longer have any paltry savings in Iceland.

There’s a fine line between insensitivity towards those who really are struggling and my plan for calculated micro-economic support, but I hope that I, in my own very small way, may be able to keep things trundling along and behave responsibly towards those who rely upon pennies like mine.

Cue large swig of cheap white wine. Exit stage left.

pseudo-halos

Alex Renton has just hit the nail on the head in an article in January’s Prospect mag.

“I do hate fashionable thrift. There are few things as unattractive as the rich talking about the joys of saving money. Especially now, when it is the duty of the wealthy to spend.”

Along with fashionable environmentalism, fashionable thrift is ubiquitous of late. It’s a shabby, shallow puddle of a solution that seems to be proffered as the panacea to all evils without much of a second thought. Was everything that went before excessive, greedy and gluttinous? And before that? Does every middle-england broadsheet reader dine on wagyu beef and truffles? It was an expensive enough country before the grey spectre of economic gloom settled on us, surely. And, if you are able to, then why aren’t you supporting small shops, restaurants and businesses when they need you so much now?

Likewise, eco-mindedness cannot be a trend – the real questions are too scary. It must be a way of life, a culture, a taken-for-granted norm, like schools, central heating and safe driving. It takes common-sense and wise governance to live less wastefully, not a flurry of ethically-sourced, vegetable-dyed, sympathetically marketed, hedge fund backed self-help eco guides.

Most of all, those offering advice must themselves exemplify and demonstrate the message – so, if you’re a London newspaper, for example, and you back a ‘save the small shops’ campaign (therefore supporting the environment, local community and small businesses), please don’t withdraw your circulation from said independent shops in favour of the UK’s largest supermarket chain (thus turning your back on your own sparkling idea). Oops, too late.

It’s easier said than done. But please, spare the public belt-tightening and self-promoting stinginess if you are in a position to help the economy, support businesses and keep things running, even on the smallest scale. Your country needs you.

Granny smiths and piles of bricks

We’ve all taken a bite from the juicy credit boom, apparently.

None more so, it seems, than the Government. It has done the one thing that we are all warned against: spending too much and living a life on credit.  In the opulent boom days of yore, the powers that be in the Treasury offices used their watercoolers imprudently, photocopied everything and overdid the paperclips. (They must have registered a lot more of their mail, too – cost-cutting being one of the more logical explanantions for all of these embarassing security leak, cds-gone-missing, faux-pas. )

Back to the hoi-poloi. We all must ween ourselves off the magnums of Crystal, buy fewer pairs of Laboutins and try to cut back on the truffle-laden decadence of Ducasse’s monument to all that glisters.  Oh, and lengthen our mini skirts, apparently. We’ll try our hardest.

The truth is that the lack of long-sightedness in favour of complex, diversity-enhancing financial packages has brought with it risk that will be felt by the new home-owners, mortgage-holders and low-income families more than anyone else. 

And after all those home-improvement programmes and the buy-to-let rental fiesta, we now realise that real estate has stopped being real. What was once a chest-swelling pile of bricks and mortar is now a very long line of zeroes and ones in a computer chip many miles away. 

Not for the first time, I’m reminded just how easy my low income, high rent, no car, no kids, no mortgage, no responsibility lifestyle is. For to buy a pad in London these days is to part with much, much inner peace.

All of us will feel the bite, but for some the apple will taste a lot more bitter and the crunch a lot louder.