Alison Prince
Filthy lucre and me.
I’ve never achieved a reliable relationship with money – it’s always been an off-and-on affair, like a flirtation with a charming rogue. You know the kind. Fun, but never around reliably enough to contemplate being wedded to. Somehow, financial stability of a reliable, husband-like sort has utterly eluded me. It wasn’t for lack of trying. After I left college armed with a useless degree in Fine Art and found a strange dearth of buyers for my paintings, I worked at weekly jobs, I really did. For a whole three months.
The bar beside the Penguin Pool at London Zoo was one of the best. I loved grabbing the internal phone when it rang and yelling, ‘Penguin?’ It was always a dull query from Head Office about something like the stocks of plastic teaspoons, but it had me mentally tossing a raw herring in the air and doing that flat-footed dance that real penguins do when they think something is funny. (I watched them a lot during the lunch break.) I got the sack from Penguin for mistreating my hat. It was one of those chef’s hats with a headband and a sticky-out bit like a white cotton halo. I tucked the halo into the headband, turning it into a rather natty cap. it started a fashion trend, so they threw me out. Typing invoices for Ford’s blotting paper – slowly, because there weren’t enough of them to fill the day – was far worse. The boredom reached a point of obligatory madness.
If one is to give the precious minutes of one’s life to any occupation, it has to be either entertaining or interesting. The blotting paper shop was neither. Teaching turned out to be great, and the cheque for sixty quid at the end of each month seemed like a present rather than wages – but marriage and babies changed everything. Freelance work became a natural stepping stone in that tide of mother-work and wifedom. Getting paid for art and writing can be dodgy, though. Journalism is usually OK, but wringing money out of big corporations can demand a mental jemmy and the threat of a solicitor’s letter (even if you don’t have a solicitor.) The memory of a bitter tussle with Disney Inc over an un-paid-for story still causes me to close my eyes in horror. But that’s the nature of money, in my experience. It’s elusive and unpredictable, with the one benefit that it can suddenly smile on you when least expected. A royalties cheque for something long forgotten can light up your sky like a rainbow.
With such an absurd financial background, I look upon the current economic shenanigans with a mixture of interest and rage. The victims, of course, are the poor souls who put their lives into working for a regular wage and now find that their available cash doesn’t buy what it used to. This seems grossly unfair. The innocent earner has been comprehensively taken for a ride by the established system, though there is of course no official recognition of this fact. Rather the reverse – it’s looked at as All Your Own Fault. But is it criminal of some earnest wage-slave to light up with relief when the man at the building society says he can have a mortgage after all? ‘Let’s just put your salary down as double what it is, shall we?’ he says. Nudge, wink. ‘Oh, thank you, sir.’ Stupid, yes. But those of us who do not move with confidence among sums of money of more than four digits are in a shark-filled sea, hoping for help from some friendly lifeboat. Too often, the lifeboat turns out to be a painted-over pirate brig, with the skull and crossbones invisibly reefed and cutlasses at hand to defend the pilfered bullion.
Innocence, alas, is no excuse for gullibility. Blake’s vision of piping down the valleys wild as the state of perfect bliss is long blown – yet the law upholds innocence as the default state until a defendant is proved guilty. In my view, the British consumer has not been proved guilty, and the government is gunning for the wrong guys. Three cheers, then, for obstinate little Iceland, which is collectively holding up two fingers to those who invested in their banks from motives of greed and now expect to be recompensed. Icelanders number fewer than one million. It’s a small, independent nation, not part of the EU. Nobody was going to bail them out at huge interest, as has happened to unfortunate Ireland. What were they supposed to do? With perfect good sense, they have taken refuge in the unassailable position of Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay. There is no blood to be got out of the Icelandic stone. Our own North Ayrshire Council, along with all the other speculators, will whistle for its money. There is no point in screaming at the bookmaker when your horse falls at the first fence. He didn’t choose the wretched nag – you did.
What fascinates me here is the slow collapse of the whole assumption that debts must be paid. In global terms, money can be seen as a free-floating state of things rather like weather. The very vocabulary is similar, with depressions and swings and shifts of pressure. Perhaps it really is time to detach this vast, money-in-the-sky activity from the daily experience of people who just want to stay alive and pay their bills. The global money-men need to think about this, if only because the collapse of a vulnerable population will be extremely expensive in terms of policing, hospitals and reluctant hand-outs – but the dreaded coalition is too busy walking backwards to see any such thing. I rather miss the days of watching the penguins for light relief. But there are always seagulls.
