The times we try to live in: a wide-ranging rant (but don’t worry, there’s humour in there as well)

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

I give in to the torrential and near-continual rainfall this summer. I give in to the inevitable liquifying of my brain owing to the bickering between the only two parties we ever see elected to government, both of them mediocre headline-chasers, uninspiring and with memberships hungry for power for power’s sake, keen to bring in yet more control freak policies, and to fuck over those least capable of withstanding being fucked over by anyone. I give in to the newspapers, TV and radio that have collectively decided it’s time for a Second Great Depression because it promises great opportunities for photographers to snap starving waifs in the city centre of Bradford (which, we’ve been told, by a misnamed think tank, should be emptied of human life as quickly as possible, with the refugees rehomed by uncharacteristically generous and practical-minded Oxford and Cambridge dons).

Life, we are told repeatedly, is shit. Never mind the pretty white butterflies, just remember most of the UK’s butterflies have now gone the way of the dinosaurs, and those white ones being Cabbage Whites are going to decimate your brassicas if you’ve tried to grow any. Today there’s a report by The Guardian so ironic and ill-timed that it is likely to be spitefully ignored by most Brits, telling us that we’re using nearly five litres of water per day, per person, and that this is indicative of us not giving a shit about water shortages elsewhere. How my deciding to wash using a cup of water and a flannel at the sink, looking out through the window at my floating garden, would help the people of Africa—or, for that matter, London—is beyond me. But, for now, I’m expected to feel guilty as shit for running the occasional bath to relax in, something you can’t do in quite the same way when taking a shower. We’re all supposed to feel guilty. About everything. Few if any appear immune from the psychological and emotional effects brought on by the miasma of gloom that hangs over this country. It’s almost as bad as the Beijing smog.

I meant what I said about a floating garden quite literally. The water table is so over-saturated, if I dig more than a foot below the ground anywhere I’m discovering a lake. The water is everywhere. It’s very disconcerting. The water rushes in to fill any hole I dig. We have, at the present time, a count of four small but deep ponds at the rear of the garden. They ain’t going away.

Ahead of the economic collapse to end all economic collapses and usher in a brave new world of darned socks, tallow candles and thin gruel, I’m collapsing in a heap. Here I am. Well and truly heaped. Just for today? Well I’d like to say yes, but frankly this summer I’ve found myself increasingly on the downturn, more emotionally than mentally. At least this means that while I currently require the use of scaffolding to raise a smile, I don’t yet need someone to unfasten the straps on my back and release my arms so that I can go take a pee. But madness has an appealing aspect: if you’re truly bonkers, you usually don’t care about much of anything. Instead of worrying about paying the credit cards, you can see the bankers who gave you the cards as lizard people plotting to take over the world. Lovely. What they’d do with it after we’ve screwed it over as extensively as we have, well, that’s anyone’s guess. If you were a shape-changing Lizard King—no, forget Jim Morrison, he was human, I think—to what use could you put the UK in its current condition? I suppose you could start intensively farming all the chavs. Let’s face it, they breed like rabbits or chickens from the moment they start to sprout body hair. Imagine row after row of nylon-tracksuited legs sticking out of cages. Scary. So many white stripes against navy, your eyes would cross if you looked at them for more than a few seconds at a time. But we could get Delia Smith to start producing some recipes to put them to good use, probably involving tinned chav with tinned peaches and lashings of, um, tinned custard. Perhaps with a bit of shop-bought basil sprinkled on top.

I got up this morning, opened the curtains, and there it was, heavy rain again. It’s the same every day. I could strap an SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) lamp onto my forehead, to shine 24 hours a day directly onto my face in the hope of tricking my body into thinking the sun still exists up there in the sky, and it wouldn’t do any good. If I had the money to take a plane ride and go somewhere hot, I’d be confronted with the fact that the carbon emitted thanks to my temporary escape could only be truly offset if I didn’t turn on any electrical items in my home for the next 12 months. Sure, take that holiday to Tunisia—but remember you won’t watch TV, have any heating, or cook for a long time afterwards. The eco-minded among us, knowing what it means to carry this new 21st Century weight of responsibility, might lament the fact that millions ignore the truth of our planetary dilemma. But we can surely understand why they do so.

The stream of bad news and dire consequences to everything we do is unrelenting. No wonder so much is made of sporting types and politicians willing to ignore the human rights record of China to go there and secure a bit of bling. Those gold medals are like straws being clutched at by an increasingly desperate nation, as in, look, everything is horrible but we can all be proud of our super-athletes. I’m not proud. So sue me for being unpatriotic. I’d be patriotic if I had good reason to be. I’d be proud of my country if we’d told the Olympic committee way back that Britain wasn’t going to take part in the Beijing Olympics because of all the blood shed by, and the suffering caused by, the Chinese government in perpetrating crimes against their own people, and the people of Tibet. The global cooperation that the Olympics is said to provide, and inspire us with, has long been an illusion. Competition is never cooperation, and the paper-thin top surface covering of the Olympics this time round was blown away by the imperfectly-timed and morally bankrupt Russian invasion of Georgia.

Not content with making the lives of Georgians as miserable as their own, or ending their lives altogether under a barrage of rocket fire, the Russians had to go threaten nuclear strikes against Poland as well. Like we didn’t have enough to contend with, with the credit crunch and the weather, without the Russians mentioning the N word, eh? World War Three, anyone? Do you want a cup of tea and a biscuit while we wait for the end of the world?

The UK’s estate agents are, for now, somehow managing to stay open for the most part despite very few mortgages being granted. It’s got so bad that when we hear of anyone being offered a mortgage provided they can stump up a 40 per cent deposit, we marvel. House prices have slid, a little, which is odd given that likely 99 per cent of properties for sale currently don’t stand a chance of securing buyers. In the perfectly ordinary town I live in, there’s no shortage of houses for sale. Prices start at £160k and rise to a cool few million. Of course, for £160k in London you can purchase a fabulous potting shed in need of only a little repair (like, a new roof). Assuming you can get a mortgage for £100k, and have the remaining £60k tucked under your mattress to hand over to the bank manager.

Oh, and in case you didn’t know, the banks are struggling to stay afloat. I am sure you, like me, send them love and best wishes for a full recovery every time they take £35 from you for having gone two pence overdrawn without first securing an appointment weeks in advance to go get permission to frivolously spend that tuppence that was never yours, granted by some spotty oink barely beyond his teenage years, ensconsed behind glass to protect him from your understandable rage. Let’s be honest here. The banks have a kind of death wish—not for themselves, but for a significant slice of the population. They want to push anyone at the bottom end of the societal ladder off it altogether, culling through encouragement of despair and suicide all those on benefits and unworkably low incomes, in a way that New Labour and Conservative politicians can only dream about. The banks only want rich people to survive the storm.

But when did you last see a rich person working behind a supermarket checkout, maintaining street lighting, emptying bins? If the rich survive and the poor die, who’s going to make the toilet paper so they can wipe their arses? They don’t think of such things when scrambling to get above the rising floodwaters of national and personal debt and other crises of our time. Man cannot live on private art galleries and the Ascot races alone, let it be said.The posh ladies’ hats don’t grow on trees.

Of course this is a rant. Hopefully a funny one, you’ll find, and one which, behind the vitriol, carries some truth. But really, I am despairing. Our household, despite having only one of us working full time, has more money coming in than most others in our town. And most of those earning less than us have two cars (not that we want two), at least two children, mortgages they seem able to pay, and the luxury of at least one holiday in the sun every year. Is it all on the never-never? If so, when will the bell toll and those people join my beloved and I in wondering how we are to survive?

We are currently spending probably less than £100 every month on food, because it’s late summer and we’ve got our hard-earned back garden harvest of potatoes, peas, carrots, beans, salad leaves, and so on. We have our own chickens producing eggs, we bake our own bread and cakes and, yesterday, I even made my first-ever batch of ice cream because it was cheaper and infinitely better than the lowest-priced ice creams in the supermarkets. It’s a low-cost treat, now engendering the lust of my sweet tooth from the freezer until my beloved is able to come home from work in London, and enjoy it with me. He was due back Tuesday night, but he was told at 6pm he had to stay. And it looks likely they’re going to expect him to stay down there all week, having offered to buy him new shirts as recompense. Go figure.

But, for all our spend on food is currently less than most families spend in a week on plasticine crap, we have no disposable income whatsoever. A holiday for us is a camping trip, when my beloved’s employers allow him leave. Of course he’s legally entitled to take time off. But the law doesn’t provide for the fear that, if he were to take the time owed to him in full, he’d risk a more robotic replacement being found to do his job. At the end of the last financial year he had over 20 days annual leave left over. They had to pay him for those days, but he needed them. He just couldn’t take the time off. Let’s not forget the EU rule that allows employers to offer jobs dependent upon you signing away your right to a reasonable number of working hours each week. Every employer gets you to sign on at least two dotted lines these days, allowing them to make you work 60, 70 or even more hours per week, safe in the knowledge that you ‘freely’ signed to allow that to happen. It disgusts and angers me, but I’m used to that anger and disgust being present every single day. Am I alone in this? I don’t for one minute think so.

The mortgage is paid every month, and we count that as a blessing, obviously enough. But then there’s the household and car insurance, the fuel—petrol, electricity, gas—and the phones, landlines and mobiles, and broadband. We manage to pay all those and have, for two months running, found that we are unable even to make the minimum payments on our credit cards. The phone calls all day and into the late evening have already started, and will shortly be countered with letters from us telling them all to freeze the accounts, the cards having been cut up, if they want regular affordable repayments to be made. As the debts are unsecured, they either accept or they go to court at high cost and get judgements against us which are unenforceable by bailiff thugs and will simply mean we can’t get into more debt until at least 2014, more likely 2016 by the time any legal processes were completed.

Yet our total debt, excluding the mortgage and my beloved’s student loan, is no more than £2,500. The average household debt in the UK, again excluding mortgages, is £8,895, rising to an incredible £20,895 if the average is based on the number of households who actually have some form of unsecured loan. So our own household money problems pale in comparison. And those figures quoted date back to February 2008–go check them out for yourself, here. Hell, I don’t need to win millions on the lottery to avoid sinking—I just need a few thousand quid, fates please note.

By all accounts, the majority of Brits are completely screwed. We’re sitting on a time-bomb and the clock has almost counted down to zero. What happens then is anyone’s guess.

The idea that we couldn’t borrow more money unless from friends and family until 2014 or later is hardly worrying in the current climate, and it’s important for the millions of others in the same boat as us to realise that we still, in desperate times, hold at least some of the aces. For those who borrowed in good times not on credit cards but through taking out second mortgages and other secured loans, the situation is completely different, even more distressing because their homes are at risk.

We’re being as sensible as we can be. The mortgage is always our number one priority. After that comes food. After that, the fuel bills. The credit cards we’re giving up on, until they agree to our repayment terms, or don’t. But the fact that we are left with nothing, no room to buy even so much as a new table lamp, or go for a weekend break that doesn’t involve a tent, is depressing to the point of inducing paralysis. What happens when the cold as well as wet weather returns? What happens when the garden has no food for us through the winter months, and we have to return to using supermarkets and market stalls? What then? It’s all too easy to envisage our house as secure, which is great, but in which we can look forward to being freezing cold, sitting in the dark, and having the rumble of our hungry stomachs for company. Sheesh.

Add to all this misery being put upon not only our household, but the nation as a whole, the news that over 45 per cent of Brits think David Cameron will make a good Prime Minister. It seems likely the Tories will win the next General Election. How stupid are those 45 per cent? David Cameron is a smooth-talking, well-off, media-savvy pillock who says exactly what he thinks the people, desperate as we are for quick fixes, want to hear. He is Tony Blair 2.0. Of course, that formerly-closeted Catholic was Margaret Thatcher 1.5. Do we ever fucking learn? Are we doomed never to progress in our politics?

Labour are fucking awful, but they weren’t always so until they became collectively insane after bin Laden flexed his terrorist muscles. But the Conservatives? Christ on a bike, I worry about my memory not being as sharp as it once was, but I clearly remember the fucked-up mess they made in the early 1990s and the disastrous social engineering of the 1980s that directly led us to the sorry state we’re in today. Nearly half the population wouldn’t know good policy if it came up and bit them in the arse. On top of the credit crunch, personal debt mountain, and perpetual rain, do we really need the prospect of a Conservative government to add to the mix? Personally, I need it like a new hole in the head to add to the ones I’ve had since birth.

Now. Bring me some bloody sunshine. If we’d had a real summer, at least we could have grabbed glasses of water and sat outside enjoying the warmth and light. No cost, maximum benefit. Wouldn’t that have been nice?