Monday, March 08, 2010
MY hairdresser lifted up the back of my hair and made a low moaning sound.
After a few more explorations, she stood back and looked at me severely in the mirror. "You did it yourself, right? To save money?"
I shrugged.
"Well, you missed bits. And the bits you didn’t miss are brassy."
She then told me she’d reduced her prices, so I didn’t need to do amateur hairdressing on myself to extend the period between dye jobs. I grovelled and promised a firm purpose of amendment.
"At least you don’t moan," she said, stamping on the pump handle at the side of the chair so I suddenly dropped to her level. (She’s the height of the average 12-year-old.) "I’m sick of it. All day, moan, moan, moan. Here and on the radio. I have to fight not to get sucked into it, because if you say you’re doing OK, people think you’re smug. Or have no sympathy with people who are broke. I’m not smug. I’m working harder than I ever thought I’d have to work, for less money and now I’ll have to keep working until I’m nearly 70 before I get the old-age pension, but that’s where we all are, right? Moaning’s not going to change anything."
She has a point. If we’re so bright and well-educated (even if Batt has found some of the grades to be just a tad elevated above reality), you have to wonder at the inflexibility of mind and attitude implicit in the unrelenting chronic whinging of the last two years. Some of it, no doubt, is caused by a variant on that comment made by the nuclear physicist, who said that if you thought you understood nuclear fusion, you were undoubtedly wrong. In a similar vein, if you dare to suggest, these days, that a) we’ve been here before and not only came out of it, but had fun along the way, or b) that negative equity isn’t up there with starvation or botulism, as a threat to life, people get pursy around the mouth. It’s as if they passed a law, when I wasn’t looking, to outlaw irrational cheerfulness.
At this stage, the national consensus, particularly about hate figures, has become so pervasive that, last week when I made a speech in Drogheda, I was impressed to hear that a bank manager from AIB, the sponsor, was going to say a few words before I spoke. It seemed an almost gratuitous display of courage.
I just don’t get the nostalgia for the Celtic Tiger years, when the rising tide lifted all boats, including several that were rotten to the gunwale and should have been left on the bottom. The boom years were vulgar beyond bearing. Business discourse consisted mostly of boasting.
Someone recently queried why so many of our best fiction writers concentrated so much on the past. I would have thought the cause was obvious. They were writing in a present where people were judged by what they owned and wore, not by what they achieved, where television programmes with production values that belonged in a pound shop were watched by people whose daft excuse was that "it was so bad, it was good". The same people thought of themselves as witty and ironic, rather than manipulated and brain-dead, when they followed the photo-opportunities of demonstrably untalented nonentities like Paris Hilton. Maybe all the binge drinking and cocaine-snorting was an attempt to get away from how boring those years really were.
Recession times, on the other hand, have a lot to offer. According to American Professor of Economics Christopher Rubin death rates, with the exception of suicides, generally go down when economies drive into a big wall. Fewer people, for example, die of heart attacks. That makes sense. Several friends of mine, made redundant from accountancy, legal or architectural partnerships, once they got over the initial shock, found themselves with space to breathe and think, read books, talk to their partners and walk regularly with the dog. A whole generation of softened-up Labradors are discovering muscles they never knew they had. One lawyer who lost his job maintains that he had no idea how much he had hated what he did, or to what degree he was stressed by it, until he lost it.
Until both of their careers hit the skids, one couple I know divided their life between working days that started at seven and didn’t end until seven in the evening or later, and "weekend breaks" in Paris, Budapest or Prague. They were strangers to their friends and to their home country. Since they lost their jobs and moved into a remarkably cheap rented apartment, they’ve transformed their lives. The man – an accountant – set himself to finding "free stuff to do". As a consequence, they have re-discovered Ireland, past and present, visiting museums, art galleries, heritage centres and historic sites. When their gym membership came up for renewal, they ditched it and bought bicycles instead, despite their fears of traffic congestion. They were agreeably surprised to find the roads much less clogged than they had expected.
"Looks like it wasn’t just us that sold off cars and started to walk or take the bus or get on our bikes as well," his partner, a former lawyer, observes. "I don’t know if anybody has measured it, but it seems to me there’s markedly less traffic on the streets."
The one expenditure they didn’t eliminate was their annual health check, which a few weeks ago suggested that redundancy had taken five years off their ages.
"We’d both lost weight and were better on almost all points of the grid," she says. "It didn’t measure happiness, but if it had, we’d have done better on that trait, too."
Although becoming happier in the wake of losing your job sounds like a contradiction, it ain’t necessarily so, according to research underway in the University of Princeton by Professor Alan Kruger.
"There’s pretty good evidence that money doesn’t matter much for how you feel, moment to moment," he reports. "What seems to matter much more is having good friends and family, and time to spend on social activities."
It could be argued that the single most important difference between the current recession and all previous economic downturns, including the Depression, is the presence of the internet. Significantly, of all of the cutbacks being looked at by the New Poor, abandoning the internet is the first and only method of saving money rejected as soon as it’s proposed. It’s not just that the web delivers instant news and constant connectedness, it also provides pastimes free of charge, like the Gutenberg Project, where it’s possible to download hundreds of thousands of books to one’s computer without paying for them.
Before we bore ourselves to death being self-righteously bitter and twisted about where They landed us, why don’t we try the alternative?
It might save our lives. And make those lives worth living.
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