Columnists
Surfers' Paradise
Whisper it, but there are some people in the world who find the fact that within six months we’ll all be homeless, reduced to eating our own shoes (mighty will be the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the Crocs devotee), and will be killing each other in the streets over the juicy corpse of a rat fresh up from the sewers, to be somehow unsettling. These are the very same delusional folk who prefer the words ‘boom’ to ‘bust’, ‘bright’ to ‘gloomy’, and ‘Alphabeat’ to ‘Radiohead’. Do not attend to their bloodily whelped cries of woe for their day is past. With global finances melting down into the primordial goo from which they emerged, we right- thinking glass-half-empty worldviewers have at last come into our own. We would cheer but it’s not really our style.
Furthermore, as we await the collapse of society and the disintegration of everything we hold dear we shall not be joining the five million or so browsers who head for Martin Lewis’s Money Saving Expert (moneysavingexpert.com) site each month. Which is a pity really, because once you get used to the dizzyingly chaotic layout of the site – it’s evidently been designed by someone suffering from whatever is the exact opposite of Aspergers – there’s a wealth of advice about how to live on less.
As a nation we are, it seems, guilty of tossing away great wheelbarrows of dosh through ignorance, thoughtlessness or a slavish grasping onto the ways we have always done things. We do not shop around for the cheapest credit cards and most rewarding bank accounts (or perhaps we foolishly opt for the most ethical we can find, regardless of the cost to ourselves); we pay more than we need to for electricity and gas (erm, ditto); and we splash out on Finest This and That rather than Not Quite So Finest This and That in the belief that we can distinguish with our tongue the subtleties a spectrograph would miss. In case trying to rectify this all sounds exhaustingly dull and puritanical the website also reveals the UK’s best 2-for-1 offers, discount vouchers and freebies, and exposes readers to refreshingly undumbed down phrases such as ‘cognitive dissonance’.
As someone long since used to living on a diet of cardboard and rainwater (weep ye not – it’s a lifestyle brought on by an aversion to proper work), it’s in my interests to imagine there’s something inherently Christian in the ‘make do and mend’ philosophy. After all, just take a look at Martin’s Money Mantra for the Skint: ‘Do I need it? Can I afford it? Is it cheaper elsewhere?’ Laying aside the moral considerations inherent in the third question, there seems to be more than a suggestion within the Holy Scriptures that loading ourselves down with material goods and, worse still, getting ourselves into debt to do so, is not the done thing. So, in six months’ time, as we scrabble around in the filth and dirt, our emaciated bodies ravaged by the cold, we can at least rejoice and be glad that it is not greed that is good after all, but doom.
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