Austerity for posterity

Terror of the blank page. Nothing compared to the obligation of the blog.

So I’ll start with the mundane, see where it takes me.

Braved a 50-minute bus journey to save £3.90.

Was it worth it? Well, I can enjoy a divinely delicious Small Batch Coffee feeling like I’ve earned it.

People’s attitudes to money are fascinating. Money is so symbolic and spending it no less.  There must be shedloads of psychological shit on it.

Incredibly, for someone born in the 70s, I come from an upbringing tempered by post-war austerity. Mum was past 40 when I arrived. Rationing is a hard habit to break. The guilt of living in a time of plenty, hard to shed.

It slowly dawned on me how little our family seemed to have in common with the rest of the world when I began to socialise in my own modest, primary school way. It was thus I discovered that the apotheosis of 70s lifestyle was the hugely fashionable modern home of my friend. Let’s call her Cynthia.

To me, used to the enclosed gloominess and chill of our 30s mock-Tudor house with its light-sucking teak panelling and single gas fire, the luxurious expanse of Cynthia’s central-heated home illuminated by huge windows and decorated in sensuous textures of velveteen and pleather was a glimpse of a foreign land.  And it was as suspect as it was marvellous.

Her bedroom was a vast space housing a confection of white and pink – but in the best possible taste. (That was some achievement in the 70s.) Clearly they were followers of Terence Conran and his ilk.  But I felt lost in that room. It seemed to me the bedroom of someone nearer adulthood, or someone who lived in film. Who else slept in a double bed and had walk-in closets?

What was it that put me on edge about being in this home? Looking back, perhaps it was the otherness of this existence, where holidays were spent ‘abroad’ in bikinis, not shivering in a holiday camp chalet. The acute novelty of being in a house where every room was warm, and decorated according to desire not just what was in a sale, induced in me a kind of culture shock, so that I was at a loss how to play with blonde, suntanned, thoroughly modern Cynthia.

Most glamorous of all - and something which I still aspire to as the ultimate in self-indulgence - was her mother’s dressing room. Yes! A room just to get dressed in! The sweet, mysterious scents of her perfumes and hairsprays lingered, reminders of her super-femininity. But the most bewitching of its contents, beside its plethora of Margot Ledbetter style organza frocks, was what sat upon the room-length dressing table and mirror: a set of mannequin heads sporting her collection of fabulous wigs.

How humble and uninspiring my mother’s dressing table was in comparison. She kept her jewellery in a blue plastic box intended for storing nails and screws, and the comb and pins she used to style her hair lived in an old biscuit tin that sat at the foot of her armchair like a dispirited lapdog.

Cynthia’s life appeared to me to shrug off the industrial strife and power cuts that defined the doomed struggle of my home with its cold regime and despair. Knowing her, my mother was probably always a little snide about Cynthia’s ‘noveau riche’ parents, so that my own attitudes melded into an outer disapproval of such luxurious self-indulgence, but inside I hid a guilty delight in its appeal.

For what was Cynthia’s life if not fun? Perhaps the most foreign cultural more that I encountered amidst her tribe was that they were so happily and blithely enjoying their lives. Such quixotic aspirations as fun were sighed over in our house. Not because we were desperately poor, far from it. Because, not only would it be terribly bad taste to enjoy spending money – it would be indicative of moral collapse.

And so is sown that most virulent seed that spreads a web of guilty confusion over money. Hiding shopping bags and receipts, going into a cold sweat at the thought of paying full price for something, a phobia of small expensive-looking boutiques…I think I’m over it now, but the imprinting of my parents’ fiscal neurosis remains.

So, if I catch the bus twice a week for a year, that’ll pay for how many coffees?