If you've been left in the lurch, blame Bedsit Guy

GIVE ME A BREAK:I'M LIVING in bedsit land again. The tumble dryer is kapput and, while it does drive up the ESB bill that's a noose around my neck, when you work away from home it's convenient for drying socks when you're trying to get three kids dressed for school.

I suspect, however, that if I call in a repairman he’ll demand a hefty call-out charge, that I don’t have, before telling me I’d be better off buying a new one.

So I have introduced an old-fashioned clothes horse to the house, passing it off as being green. The youngest is fascinated by its accordion-like structure.

I dare not say that the central heating isn’t going on until frost forms on the windows.

Do you remember the “good times” – three holidays a year, eating out four times a week and all of that?

Well, I’m still waiting for those times to roll around and so are most people I know. Pay cuts, job losses, higher taxes – who’d have thought it would come to this when the fat cats controlling the banks were borrowing millions they hadn’t a hope of paying back while telling us to live within our means? I’m sure I met some of those guys in bedsit land. They were the types of people who never brought a bottle to the party and ate all the food. He was the guy who used the last of the milk, tea and sugar and never replaced them. He left the Calor Gas heater to burn out and never replaced the cylinder, then polished off the cake your mother dropped in. Only after he was long gone, owing you loads, did you discover that his parents were filthy with lucre. You would later learn that he’d joined the mega-millions club without having to buy a ticket.

Then you turn around, years later, and Bedsit Guy – or more likely his employee who is just as badly off as you are – is telling you to tighten your belt and demanding that you supply, in minute detail, a complete record of personal spending so that you feel as though your smalls are on display on that great clothes horse of financial insolvency. He refuses you a loan anyway.

During the “good times” there were voices in the wilderness telling us that we were a society of the haves and the have-nots, and that the disparity between the two was growing. When Combat Poverty told us that one in three children lives in poverty, we didn’t want to believe it. Poverty is relative and those poverty people were setting a high bar. How could a kid be poor if he had a TV in his bedroom? The poor were “them” not “us” and they never would be “us”. Poverty was a result of some bad choices. A few years later, St Vincent de Paul is getting more requests from middle-class people who have learned how easy it is to become one of “them”.

What is poverty? Are you poor when your partner becomes unemployed and one child needs new glasses and another needs €30 for a school trip and another needs €25 for a book that wasn’t on the list and two of them need to see the dentist and you can’t afford any of it? The Government’s solution at the weekend was to hold out the begging bowl to a hand-picked, overwhelmingly male and rich diaspora in whose reflected glory it could appear to be doing something. These sons of Ireland have admirable achievements measured in squillions and who would envy them the task of telling us how to get rich again? But is getting rich again the answer? Until something else fundamental changes, like our sense of values, we’ll only squander the wealth again.

Whoops, I feel myself back in bedsit land having written that, and the guy who ate all the food is laughing at me and calling me an idealist – before walking out into the night with the prettiest girl and an armful of albums and books that I’ll never see again.

Or, maybe Bedsit Guy really has lost it all. Maybe that pretty girl has been left picking up the pieces. I think of a developer’s wife who spends her days answering the phone and door to debt collectors.

The good ones don’t arrive in a van with two strong men. She is praying that the childrens’ allowance isn’t touched.

Is she a have or have not? All it takes to switch from one to the other is the loss of a couple of contracts, if you’re self-employed, or the loss of one job in a family where the mortgage depends on two, or the serious illness of an elderly parent needing residential care.

Are you poor when you start doing without the things you used to take for granted, not minor things like tumble dryers, but serious things like regular trips to the dentist? Is that where thriftiness ends and middle class poverty begins? You tell me. Bedsit Guy isn’t listening.

kholmquist@irishtimes.com