I went out drinking with Thomas Paine...

... he said that all revolutions are not the same...

This song came out in 1991, right in the middle of the last big fat recession. It's amazing how sharp it suddenly sounds. 

And its inspiration, Thomas Paine, died 200 years ago. It's amazing how sharp *he* suddenly sounds as well. Fairtrade cotton company Gossypium (based in his home town of Lewes) have just released a very cool T-shirt in his honour. I am tempted. As BB also famously (chez joella at least) said, the revolution is just a T-shirt away. 

Or maybe it's more the case that we just carry on reinventing a broken wheel until we go the way of the dinosaurs. In which case, I'm having one for the road. 

joella

The devil in the detail

I'm trying hard to make myself recession-resistant, but it's hard when there's a rat in my kitchen (possibly now a rat corpse, either way full of raisins), a leak in my roof, and the cold wind blowing. In days like these you'd think, as I always have in fact, that a fixed rate mortgage would make sense, in the spirit of 'best to know what you're committed to' shoebox full of envelopes type budgeting.

And it might, if we hadn't sodding well remortgaged at 5.79% for three years just before the Bank of England got busy. It's eye watering, but at the time it felt like the safest thing to do. I was talking to my dad about it, as he was about to transfer me the money for the new boots my parents have bought me for my birthday and I need it to come through as I've already paid for the boots and I can't otherwise pay my tax bill. It's not desperate, I have a job and there are some envelopes whose contents can be moved around a bit, but it's tighter than I can remember for many many years.

Have you thought about switching deals? he said. But there's a penalty, I said. Yes, he said, but if you were to save several hundred pounds a month, then over three years it might well be worth it.

He's right, he usually is. It's just he's not the one who has to do it. I decided to be brave and raise the subject last night, when I got back from drinking strange and interesting beer with A and L. M was already in bed, so I cut straight to the point. He looked at me calmly, put in his earplugs, and turned off his light.

It feels a bit like the Ryanair dilemma. You can save forty quid by taking a four hour bus journey to Stansted, being driven onto a plane with a cattle prod, paying good money for bad sandwiches, and fighting a passport control bottleneck battle at two in the morning with the entire population of Essex. OR you can go to Heathrow and get on a proper flight.

I don't know if there is a right answer. I have changed providers of pretty much everything in the last 12 months, usually for the first time, and it's almost always been a miserable, drawn out experience involving endless phone calls to call centres in far off places following attempted scrutiny of inscrutable small print. And I am numerate, literate, and practical. The less money you have, the more time you have to spend making sure you're not getting ripped off. There's something wrong with this equation.

joella

Recession playlist: track #3

The Bevis Frond's Maybe - part obliteration, part all seeing. A mainstay of my soundtrack to the last recession, and important for other reasons too. At least one boat is named for this song.

And are we the worst, who see it all, and still refuse to act?

Yeah, maybe.

joella

Party like it's 1991

I'm just back from a municipal swimming experience. Which is better than no swimming experience at all, but it did make me pine for the lake. In the lake, you could swim and swim and swim, turning thoughts over in your mind until they came to rest naturally.

And while I was there, swimming in the lake, I thought a lot about calmness, and how I should strive for more of it. Which of course I forgot as soon as I got home and got furious with the shrieking students and the parking hell and the relentless greyness and the price of butter. But as I was swimming today, for the first time in ages, my muscles seemed to remember, and I found myself thinking about calmness again.

I get angry too quickly. Not as quickly as J the plumber, who goes from 0 to C-word in about five seconds, but too quickly. With people, not with things. I am quite patient with things. But with people, I get furious, because they are so often Inconsiderate Or Just Plain Thick. Or are they?

Take the students next door (I wish someone would, BA BOOM!). Now, I graduated into a recession, and it wasn't much fun. Some people got jobs, but they were mostly the ones who had confused me by suddenly cutting their hair and putting on a suit around the beginning of their third year. That was their "student experience", and now it was time for their "junior financial analyst experience". Or whatever.

Those of us without a five year plan, or an old school tie network, who had thought we'd maybe see what happened next, found that what happened next was we signed on. My dad kept asking me when I was going to become a yuppie, I wrapped my oversized Oxfam overcoat more tightly around me and glared at him.

And got wrecked. A lot. For quite a long time. It was great fun. But it was also about the only thing that made any sense. And we were a luckier generation than this lot -- we were impoverished but we weren't hugely indebted. Nobody delivered us pizzas, so we could more or less cook; nobody had invented alcopops, so we drank cheap beer, and we didn't have mobile phones or laptops or iPods to maintain. It was all a lot more manageable. I'm also pretty sure we spent considerably less on personal grooming. Or maybe that was just me.

After a year or so, I borrowed some money and went travelling with my Significant Ex for a year, during which I'm pretty sure we spent less than we would have if we'd stayed at home. Eventually, of course, I did get a job, and pretty grim it was too. But that's another story.

So I do have sympathy with my neighbours' regular, valiant attempts to obliterate reality by means of vodka, class As and screaming*. It's cold, and it's going to get colder. And if you've been overindulged to the extent that you tumble dry your washing all year round, it's going to be tough when those bills start coming in and your dad's not paying them anymore.  

joella

* Not limitless sympathy, mind. Though they have been a lot better since M went round in his pink dressing gown and yelled 'I'm not interested in 'sorry', I'm interested in you shutting up'. 

Keep Calm And Carry On

I'm basically living in a self-imposed news blackout at the moment. I am waking up to silence rather than the Today programme, avoiding news.bbc.co.uk (a harder thing to do than I ever imagined), switching off the television set (not very hard at all) and not buying newspapers.

It's not that I don't care about global economic meltdown, but there is Nothing I Can Do. For anxious people, this is all the chickens come home to roost. We secretly knew they would. We hate being right.

But I can see no point in immersing myself in the current media frenzy, with its heated debates and BIG DOWNWARD POINTING ARROWS. It doesn't help, it just makes the dull screaming noise that's usually far in the distance much, much louder. I don't need the dull screaming noise right now. I've got stuff to do.

The dust will settle, and I will re-engage. A lot of it will be bad, but there are good bits too. One of them, of course, is the death of Thatcherism. I am glad she lived to see it. There are many, many things that the free market will never provide, and they are mostly the same many, many things that are worth celebrating about humanity.

So here's to more human times, eventually, and in the meantime check out this glorious Steve Bell cartoon. I broke my news blackout for this one, and it's going on the wall.

joella

joella

Recession playlist: track #2

This one's for Gordon. I used to love this song back when I had a broken heart in the dark days of Thatcherism.

joella

Joe Six Pack And His Slippery Slope To Socialism

You know, I almost feel sorry for George W. First he started a really stupid war by lying about stuff, and as a result we worked out that his 'serious' face was not to be trusted. So the next time he put his serious face on nobody believed him, and as a result he's presiding over the sudden disintegration of global capitalism. What's a cowboy to do?

I don't have any shares and my pension was most of a hill short of a hill of beans anyway, so as long as I have enough of a job to cover my share of the mortgage, and M has enough work coming in to cover his, I reckon we'll work something out. Neither of us has a credit card, and we have learnt how to grow onions, potatoes, broad beans and (tbc) brussels sprouts, so we can move into Austerity Mode at fairly short notice. There's a lot to be said for being low maintenance. As Plumbing S said, while taking a chainsaw to another fallen tree, 'I might be oil-poor but I'm wood-rich'.

On the home front, I have taken Mr B's advice and found a secret weapon in the War Against Brookesalikes. Our new housemate is black and 6'3". I was telling him about the recent shrieking issues. Oh, I'll go round next time, he said. When I ask people to keep the noise down they usually do, for some reason.

I'm almost looking forward to it.

joella

Sun comes up, it's Saturday morning

It's been a weird old week, no? Every morning the Today programme woke me up with more tales of global economic meltdown. I don't understand how banks work -- in fact several of us round a pub table with plenty of maths qualifications between us established that we had no idea what the FTSE numbers actually represent. I've always secretly believed that nobody does really, and indeed that all financial instruments more complicated than a biscuit tin under the bed have something of the Emperors New Clothes about them. And on the evidence of this week, I think I might be right. 

I take no great pleasure in this, of course. I don't want thousands of people who earn honest livings to lose their jobs or homes, and I don't want to wake up one day to find that all our stuff are belong to China. 

It's pretty gloomy at NGO X as well, as we are busy making ourselves fit for the future and that future has people giving less money to NGOs as they need it all to keep the heating on and buy cheese. There are days when I can see why people choose to be doctors or policemen or schoolteachers. *And* the mortgage has just gone up *and* we don't have a lodger at the moment *and* the weather has that 'I'm going to get cold soon' edge to it that normally I love but this year... this year makes me feel poor. 

But I don't turn the radio on on Saturday mornings. Instead I sleep and sleep and sleep until I'm good and ready to wake up. I still have some residual exhaustion (emotional, probably) from the Hot Place, so I wasn't good and ready until nearly 11. M was still asleep too, and we woke up to a sunny, sunny morning, and more silence than you would expect at the end of Freshers Week. 

The allotment needs attention. I'm going to pack up last night's leftover curry, make up a bottle of Ribena (we can still afford high-end cordial), get out the hand tools and go and get dirty. It will all, one way or another, work itself out.

joella