DO THE FRENCH call it "le crunch", or does that phrase still belong to the advertising campaign of a particular apple in the 1980s? Either way, wherever you look the global recession is beginning to bite, writes John Butler
En France, le crunch has left a blackened withering husk. In America, the apple of the economy has been eaten down to the core. In Ireland there's nothing left but pips. And on and on, until the metaphor is crushed and ready to drink - a glass of cloudy, brown, destroyed-economy juice.
I can understand the panic, but that's about it. Where does money even come from? God knows. It's top of the list of things about which I know nothing - how to count it, hold on to it and put it in the right places. When I should have been learning about it (in the class of . . . I can't even remember his name. Her name?) I was gadding about in newsagents, indolently flicking through the pages of magazines I couldn't afford to buy. This acquired habit of mine lets me know that the hard times are coming. These days, every magazine and TV show is counselling us about saving, not spending money.
I'm following this editorial off-shoot of the credit crunch with great interest, not because I believe that following money-saving tips will make me happier, but because I don't. I don't even think they'll make me rich. I've culled some examples from the media and hereby serve them for your delectation, in descending order of usefulness. Some I would apply to my life had I saved the kind of money to warrant them. For example, I would totally consider getting rid of my car had I ever managed to acquire one.
The second tip is to drink tap water, and how I love that the world has suddenly acknowledged bottled water to be the royal scam we had hitherto suspected. In third place, the idea of walking instead of taking cabs is dandy, as is running in the great outdoors instead of some pungent gym. I enjoy doing my own cooking, and although money-saving tip number six happens to be illegal, downloading music in defiance of litigious record companies would feel so right had one (pure hypothesis, this) been made to pay £21.99 for a middling-to-bad Aztec Camera album in 1986.
I have something of an ownership fetish which prevents me from deploying tip number seven, but visiting a library for your books seems a reasonable suggestion. Then comes the choice between landline and cell phone. Not withstanding complications with broadband and digital TV, it seems the landline would get the boot here. For me, getting rid of broadband is not an option. I'm willing to be that guy with the monthly direct debit for his 8gig connection wondering why it's taking him 15 minutes to access his email, while next door, 21 friends play computer games on his dime.
So far, so good, but the line must be drawn somewhere. The following were recently posted on an online forum in response to a question about how to survive le crunch. "Drink ghetto latte". Hmm. Much as I like the name, I don't think I'll ever go back to drip coffee. "Be ruthless about finding happy hours, places with portions big enough to bring home." To my mind, that seems to be overdoing it. "For dinner, have samples from the cheese shop." Hang on, what? "Always forget your wallet." "Make people at bars buy you drinks even if you don't intend to sleep with them." "Visit friends at times when they're likely to be cooking dinner - wouldn't your grandma like you to stop by for dinner?" "Shower at the gym or at work." "Never redecorate. Never vacation. Never have friends over. Never change your style." "I can't believe no one has mentioned dumpster diving."
Who are these people? There's nothing particularly attractive about throwing money around, but apart from saving, some people might be forgetting about another side effect of prudence - being known a despicable tightwad. And the irony inherent in acquiring such a reputation is that there's nothing economically viable about it. Once you have been thus identified, the world adapts its behaviour to extract as much money out of you as is humanly possible. I do, anyway. The pub reflects the greater world in myriad ways, and when a known tightwad seizes the opportunity to buy a tiny round while everyone's pints are full, the rest will demand another, a "safety pint". The nastier ones among us will then conspicuously not drink it, to further compound the misery of the cornered miser.
I don't quite have the brain power to figure out whether this is a valid example of "the tragedy of the commons" - that economic circumstance best explained by way of a metaphor wherein every farmer avails of free ground assigned to let everyone's animals graze, thereby destroying the common land for all herders in the future. In the pub, it seems that the tightwad's wallet is the commons, and by plundering it in this way, we are validating his own terrible behaviour in the past. Not only will he never again put his hand in his pocket, he will never again even enter the pub. But is this tragic? It all depends on whether he's a good singer.
Clearly the recession brings out the worst in all of us. I told you I was no economist, but I do know terrible behaviour when I'm the one behaving terribly. So this expert hopes that the oil thing is fixed, the men in Jermyn Street shirts cease bellowing at each other about the price of frozen orange juice and pork bellies, that everyone starts buying houses, tickets to Riverdance and massive rounds of drinks - including bottled water - again. That way, we can all be nice to each other like we were in the 1990s, right?