Madam, – Your “Signing On” column is always such a gripping and affecting diary account of pain and despair, cruel in its veracities (Tuesdays, Life Culture). It’s so good it could be fiction. Even if it were a fictionalised column written by some journalist – which one hopes it’s not – it stands as a narrative of human tenacity tinged with anguish, as well as being a catalogue of the indignities meted out by a society in the grip of panic and pettiness. These accounts of what it’s like to be unemployed are biting and raw, and as far as I recall there was nothing like them in print media during the bleak mid- 1980s.
The writer may feel he sold himself too cheaply during his week’s hard graft (February 22nd). But in another way, he didn’t. He underwent one of those miracle changes in perspective, whereby he cared about someone else’s destiny, about that single mother with all her survival pressures, and conveyed that to us, his readers. His “boss” may not give a damn, because he’s on his own voyage of survival, taking desperate measures in desperate times. Cut-throats always survive while co-opting dispensable “slaves” from week to week, but it’s people like your writer who capture the human consequences of the rotten-to-the-core banking practices with which our government gaily colluded, and which has created absolute misery in the lives of so many.
Your writer is not the only one who sold himself short. We all did – though some were happier to do it than others. – Yours, etc,