Day 4: Cashback

There Will be Blog

Since leaving school, there has been many occasions where I've acted as though I've had it all. Want a new shirt? Go buy it. Want some new DVDs? Sure. Fancy a gold plated statue of Godzilla to take pride of place in the drawing room? Of course I do. I can't imagine the volumes of sweaty pennies have been pushed into sweatier palms for all manner of tat that I didn't need at the time and in the end had to leave in the basement flat that Susan and I were hiding out in because the smell got so bad, I had to bag her up in a Louis Vutton suitcase and pull her up the fire escape before the council kicked the door in.

There's only one thing that stopped me becoming a preening little toss bucket, wearing jaunty scarfs at 'interesting' angles, wafting my iPhone under the noses of homeless people begging for change, while grinning inanely and pissing into their hat. It's the thing that separates regular people from evil little advertising agency types who think milk is a 'specialist dietary supplement' and that Northerners are an ethnic minority. It's the thing that keeps the human psyche just paranoid enough to want pretty things but resist because you recognise their pointlessness (like novelty key rings or Katie Price). It's the concept of shame.

Shame vs. Avarice is the eternal struggle between a love of shiny bric-a-brac to decorate your house, your shed or yourself with and the desire to avoid looking a little bit tacky. It's not really a class debate any more, because it's just as possible to be poor and have lots of expensive things, just as it is to have money (or the means to borrow large amounts of it from Molly Mastercard and Vernon Visa) and not regurgitate your own spleen in excitement over some flip flops and fancy hair gel.

But it's an easy trap to fall into, especially when we let pride get in the way of our natural sense of perspective. We've all been in Selfridges (or the like) where, from the second you walk in you feel the eyes of the assistant on you, trying to peer into your soul. You can hear their thoughts turning in their head as they examine your life in an instant and conclude 'there's no way he can afford anything in here..' looking so far down their nose at you, their eyes are practically on the moon. That is, they are thinking that right up until they become too busy trying to stop me from hammering a hockey stick into their toilet parts with a camping mallet. Now that's what I call a sense of perspective.

We've been here before, in the eighties, when everyone larked about on immensely powerful BBC Basic computers, had robot butlers and ate gold bars and dolphin eyes, served to us on the back of a starving African. Twenty or so years later we did the same, just moved forward with the times. In the 2000's we frittered our money away on ebay Turin Shrouds, downloaded sushi, our own Hadron Collider or on paying an embryo in a tutu 300 quid to cut our fringe at a slightly different angle to the one we had before, hoping that it caught the light in such a way that it briefly illuminated the dead space behind our eyes where dreams and love and happiness used to be. Good times.

But now, the good times have ended. Happiness comes, still from buying, but from buying the same stuff slightly cheaper than before. You still eat beans, but you get them from Aldi. You still buy jumpers, but you get them from H&M. You still burgle the elderly for kicks, but I guess that was always free (ahhh, the best things...).

As for me, well I scaled back my hopes years ago. Nowadays, I know the price of what I want and the price of what I need. When it comes right down to it, you can buy an X-box, you can buy some sweet looking new boots, you can buys a genetically modified calf that can be milked for whisky and coughs up coins into the feed bucket. But would you really be happy? Would you? Really?

Oh. Sorry. Of course you would. Sell it you for a tenner...?

Sweetdreamslittleones. xx