I hear on the news today that the worlds seems to be in a bit of a financial pickle at the moment Apparently there are a number of people who don’t have enough money, a few nations are short of a herring or two and some banks have stopped giving out free pens to cut costs.
This is all very tragic of course, no one wants to see the world crumbling into anarchy under the yoke of financial ruin, but what I was disturbed to see on the idiot box this morning was a special report about some estate full of people not really copping that well somewhere in the grim north. It seems that everyone on the estate is both poor and an idiot, a pretty bad combo.
Everyone is broke you see, so they are taking loans out to buy heating, then taking loans out to pay their loans, then loans to pay for the loans that are paying for the loans that are paying for the heating and so on and so on.
Now I know what you are thinking, surely you can’t be angry that people are poor and are being prayed upon by frankly awful door step loan sharks? Well no for some reason this did not irritate me despite the blindingly obvious flaw in their loan strategy.
What did make me incandescent with rage was one of the hags they interviewed.
Hag: “The bills in the house are too expensive to make you think about buying Christmas presents, I don’t know how people cope.”
Umm what, leaving aside the poor grammar this strikes me as an odd thing to admit? Your too poor to turn the heating on, but you’re still pondering whether to waste money on presents for a festival that’s so far removed from it’s real meaning we might we well just cancel it once and for all? Frankly if this is true, I’m half inclined to demand that all benefits be removed from anyone seen in Toys’R’Us at once, including child benefit, if indeed this still exists, I half suspect it’s been removed and the funds diverted to repaper the walls of the Queen’s lavatories.
If you can’t afford heating, stop bloody wasting money on utter crap for your urchins. Sure they might be a bit upset for a few weeks, but I imagine it will be more upsetting when they freeze to death one night in dark, cold, January clenching their brand new High School Musical 3 box set in their now frozen fingers.
I don’t mean to sound mean spirited, well OK I do, it’s well documented that I loathe Christmas and wish to see it canceled for ever, but you are choosing to waste money on it, it’s not a basic essential, you could just carry on with life as normal and not throw away all your hard borrowed swag on complete bollocks.
Have some bloody priorities…