Dark times lie ahead
Down the years, I have made a study of creature comforts. I hasten to add that I don’t mean the Aardman stop animation films, entertaining though they are with their Gromits, their Wallaces and their fondness for Wensleydale.
Nor have I put much effort into examining what creature comforts have come to mean which, to quote the Eagles is, “everything, all the time.” A life in the fast lane of abundance where our tastes have become jaded by the sheer easy availability of everything from a quick holiday in Dubai to Heston Blumenthal. For Christmas. From Waitrose.
Ours has been, like the short happy life of Francis Macomber, an exercise in handsome self-delusion in which we have set forth on the plains of plenty, all the gear, no idea and all the while unknowing that the economics have a shotgun trained upon us and there’s about to be a terrible, terrible “accident” before the sundowners are served.
All of which brings us neatly back to what I mean by creature comforts. Those small, simple, personal luxuries that make the a hostile world bearable. They are the god of small things. Succour to the pilgrim in a foreign land, the great redeemer of hope and memory.
One can observe their morale-boosting effect in films and TV series that combine both the circumstances they depict with the times in which they were made. Take Porridge, the prison classic in which Ronnie Barker’s Norman Stanley Fletcher wangles a weekend of compassionate leave away from the bleak HM Prison Slade, and made in the bleaker early 70s.
“Some of us”, he tells his fellow inmates on return, “Was (sic) in the pub. Or eating roast beef. Or watching Spurs win at home…. or lying in their big, crisp, bed with their big, crisp old lady.”
Or in the plethora of films made in the austere 1950s, like the Dambusters, in which the mission crews are given bacon and eggs for breakfast while everyone else has toast and jam. And the 1948 Scott of the Antarctic where, as the expedition celebrates June’s mid-winter, a tin of Capstan’s Navy Cut and a bottle of port are positioned carefully in the foreground of shot.
When winter is coming – and both literally and figuratively it is – it is to these things we turn to help us endure. The scarf sent to the trenches, the Red Cross parcel to Colditz, the nip of whisky in that isolated district commissioner’s residence in the darkness up-country and far, far from here.
Even in the financial crisis of a few years ago, it was to the homely brands of tomato soup and milk chocolate to which people turned for a nursery dose of comfort.
But as we head back to the future to live, like our grandparents, with the pre-occupations of not much more than the domestic economy of bills, food and new school shoes for the kids, it’s entirely possible that even as we slump of an evening in front of the log burner – the heating will be switched off – and grope in the candlelight of our energy-rationed rooms for the meagre consolation of small cost luxuries, they will be just out of reach. Luxuries still, low cost no longer.
Let’s take Fletch’s list, leaving his ‘big, crisp missus’ out of it.
Pubs, of course, have suffered a casualty rate broadly in line with the first day on the Somme. The reasons are many and some are self-inflicted but they trade ultimately in being a welcome beacon in the night, which is why Victorian brewers built them on unlit street corners and filled them with light and mirrors. A bit like Wetherspoon’s really.
But light and pumps and tills and heat require energy. Energy costs and costs extortionately. Then, if the landlord can get staff to draw you a pint, there’s the wage spiral. Add the VAT and the rent and the transportation cost and, of course, the energy costs involved in producing beer in the first place, none of which are going down. Little wonder that a recent Sunday Times infographic estimated that on a £5.95 pint, pubs are making a 15p loss. Meanwhile, in London, one nameless pub asked a casual £8 for your favourite gargle. Having another, Fletch? No. Me neither.
Meanwhile, over at Norman Stanley’s beloved Spurs, things are little different, what with a state of the art stadium and the price of keeping Harry Kane to fund. According to Sportbible’s research with Bloomberg: “The club who sells the most expensive season ticket in the country are Tottenham Hotspur, with their most expensive option priced at an eye-watering £2025.”
It continues: “For a local fan to watch Tottenham, it would cost them 90% of their monthly median salary, even the club’s cheapest option would cost them almost a third of their monthly wage.”
Which only leaves the roast beef of old England, and, according to the ONS, it has shifted from £11.06 a kilo in February to £11.32 in July.
I could go on. By tradition, these things have held up in recessions. There’s always a few quid for a pint, or the nail bar or the ticket to the match. But no longer.
Businesses and families caught between exorbitant energy pricing, generalised inflation and rising interest rates will struggle to keep the shop door open, the roof above their head and the kids fed. It is that stark.
It’s amazing what people will do to keep going. They will drop the holidays and the meals out. They’ll take two jobs. The car will have to run another year longer – providing it’s not on a lease you can no longer afford – as long as there’s some small reward at the end of it to incentivise continuing.
But when even the god of small things demands sacrifice, trouble follows. To plod joylessly from one day to the next, when the TV subs are too much to sustain, when the bread and circuses of our lives are no longer available, when the knock-offs flogged in the few remaining pubs work in direct correlation to the crime and when demagogues move in on the envy and the anger and the disappointment, it is then we’ll know the value of life’s creature comforts if only because the greater ones will seem like a dream we once had.
It’s rare, very rare, I invoke miserabilist indie band James but I fear , I must:
“ ..Now I’ve swung back down again
It’s worse than it was before
If I hadn’t seen such riches
I could live with being poor…”
Many of us will have to. Some won’t be able to. These are the dark times now.