The current financial climate reminds me of a poster on a friend’s wall.
It was back in our student days when we were all children of the revolution like Marc Bolan.
We pinned posters on our walls, quoted JFK and Martin Luther King and thought we might change the world.
Everyone had a dream.
We marched in student protests about fees when we – those lucky northerners who went south to study – did not have fees and even enjoyed decent grants. How times have changed.
We held sleepover protests in the library about student fees… we occupied buildings.
Joe Duffy of RTE fame, paced up and down in a green duffle coat on the steps in the front square and set fire to a letter from the university bigwigs. Sock it to em Joe.
But that poster on my friend’s wall had a serious message.
It read: “First they came for the socialists and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist…”
It ends with the line: “Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.”
I think, says I to my other half, KamiKwasi is coming for all of us.
A friend who once led a team that won University Challenge wrote that he was incredibly bright and renowned for his speed on the quiz button .. his nickname was “Trinity Kwarteng”.
When I tell my other half that, he raises his Paxman eyebrow. We have no faith in this Trinity.
You can stick your head in the sand and refuse to really take on what’s happening or you can start counting the pennies.
We’re closing our eyes at the petrol pump, leaving the oil off and yes, turning off the lights.
Down the corridor of time, my father’s voice echoes.
He has just arrived home and has counted the number of lights blazing.
“What is this… Blackpool illuminations?” he’d ask and we’d just shrug and ignore him.
And here in my double jumper and woolly socks, I thought I might just have a look at my personal pension. It’s somewhere I find myself heading more often these days.
It’s an age thing. Suddenly you’re checking the deaths in the paper and surveying a future that’s not looking so bright.
After the KamiKwasi weekend, I should have known better.
I get a graph in my pension app that tells me how things are going … it’s generally a squiggle that goes up a little, down a little.
On a good day, the line sings of warm sun holidays studying the menu del dia as little waves lap at my toes: a world of 90 per cent cocoa chocolate and real butter.
At the weekend, that line took a dive off the highest of diving boards. It plunged by about £30,000.
The future suddenly looked positively Dickensian… and I am writing this as someone with a tartan rug on her knees.
We shall be holidaying in Ahoghill and dining on broken biscuits if only there were still a Kingsland about where we might buy them.
“Doomed! Doomed! We’re all doomed!” I cried like Corporal Jones from Dad’s Army.
“Don’t check your pension… you’ll only give yourself high blood pressure,” texts a friend.
So we’re steadying ourselves with dark detective thrillers.
Hit me with dark and extra grim, I say.
Take the one where the murderer buried his victims alive and suffocated them very slowly… bringing them to the point of death, then bringing them back again, just so he could do it all over again.
Cheery or what? It certainly takes your mind off the current fiscal reality.
On Twitter, I’m a big fan of the Grand Auld Sthretch – an account that charts how the days are getting longer.
Only not any more. It’s called The Grand Drawing In these days and with the sun setting at 18:13, there’s damn all grand about it.
I do not enjoy the Grand Drawing In as much as The Grand Auld Sthretch. I do not enjoy the dying of the light.
Darkness seeps under the back door, I feel the icy hand of austerity on my shoulder.
I may have to put up a poster.
“Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness,” the poster shall say.
“Pour me a glass,” I tell my other half. “Or as Omar writes in the Rubaiyat:
“Fill me with the old familiar juice,
Methinks I might recover by and by.”
