Genteel Poverty

It was a perfect August Bank Holiday Sunday yesterday.  Skies were blue, seas the regulation sparkling aqua marine, sunlight sparkled, ice-creams were consumed in copious quantities as 50,000 people tried to ward off the hunger pangs that might strike if forced to walk more than a few metres through Brighton without fuelling up.

I sat on the beachfront by a pub listening to live music, watching bronzed bodies sashay past, and thought:-
"Now.  If I can get a glass of Cider for 2 quid, I might be able to afford it: - if I buy the washing up liquid at Poundland and do without the Lime Marmalade till next fortnight...." And then, surprisingly, I thought. "Wotha??  It's the face of Genteel Poverty."

Genteel Poverty, I know now, is just ordinary poverty but you're just a little more repulsed by it than others.

Its finding out that anything you can afford to buy new will fall apart within the month, so it's better to buy second-hand.  Everything. Rather than buy flour sifters that rust the first time you wash them; dishwasher liquid that doesn't raise the pallid ghost of a bubble until you've squeezed half the bottle into the bowl; towels that get damp before you've even done a full circuit of all bits that need to be dried. And not lets even get into the whole subject of toilet paper.  Who even KNEW there was such a thing a 1-ply loo paper? This is one of those sordid little facts which, in an ideal world, nobody would ever need to have to learn.

But it goes further, of course.  Like the first time you are crossing a road and holding up the traffic...and you realise that, from now on, you will ALWAYS be the one crossing.  Not the one sitting in their car sending our Dark Thoughts to bloody pedestrians.

Or, as you are watching a movie on your lap top where people are sitting in real restaurants with thick carpets, and a discreet band, and soft-footed waiters, you suddenly think: "OMG! I will never use a linen napkin again in my entire life."

It's like dying, a little bit.  You go around, swimming through the usual layers of your life and sadly, nostalgically, bidding them all good-bye. Never again will you stay in a good hotel; ride in a boat, wear shoes that smell like shoes instead of like plastic,

You'll probably never see any other place for the rest of your life where the sand is white and squeaks as you walk on it; or swim naked in the moonlight; or go to a Live Show, or buy fruit that you want as opposed to fruit you can afford.

When people take pictures of poverty its of people wearing anoraks and looking depressed who have dirty hair.  Its never of women with real leather handbags (50p from a church fete); well cut clothes (Fill a Bag for One Dollar day at St. Vincents de Paul.); who are post-Graduate educated, extensively travelled; and who would, of course, have made a killing from  Divorce and widowhood.

The world just isn't supposed to work like that.

I should like to write a book one day: - "Being Poor for Dummies". For all those people (there might even be one close-by you at this moment) who didn't start off poor.  Who got the deck shuffled just one time too many and ended up going from Up to Down and whom we find just a tad embarrassing.

If they have any sense of decently left at all,  these Genteel Povos would gradually, with dignity, remove themselves from the purlieu.  It is, after all, very difficult to find anything one has in common any more.

Yeah.  I sat in the sun and thought about all this stuff yesterday.

But hey, today I woke up and thought "Fuck 'em all".

Maybe something'll turn up.