12 February 2013 2 Comments

‘That’ll be £4.50 for an organic low fat latte in a chi chi cup in this season’s colour, sir’

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3577/3430377352_0a0c5f6e98_z.jpg

I was watching one of those programmes en passant (pretentious: moi?) last week, which had a title like ‘I am so up myself that I need to have a home makeover as it expresses the essential me’. That, obviously was not the correct title, but it was one of those programmes that proliferated more so a few years back about having the ‘perfect’ home.

Mostly I find them nauseating; not because I don’t like a cared for home, but that it elevates ‘home’ and spending above all else- it becomes almost a god. Yes ok, there is a teensy bit of envy there; I would love to have a place of my own and not be reliant on someone else for accommodation.

One bit really hit me in this programme. One of the people who owned this particular house spoke about being driven almost to tears because they could not get the right bannister rail to set off the sweep of their stairs. I may not have got the exact inference at that point as I was frothing at the mouth and going red and shouting things like ‘Couldn’t you have been moved to tears by the starving millions, those being victimised by the Tory ‘bedroom tax’  or something else instead of the aesthetic appeal of your staircase?’ I believe the words ‘heart rending’ were also used at some point but I had lost it by then.

There is a theory that if you give people enough money, raise living standards, encourage people to think etc that they, being good, spontaneously share and improve the common good. Whoever had that theory needs a firm slap and made to watch decorating programmes featuring the middle/upper middle class for at least a day. Maybe they will then come to the conclusion that the middle /upper middle classes in the developed West don’t really have any limits when it comes to self-pleasuring; there will always be another product, another bauble, another makeover that will make it all better…..at the exclusion of sharing/investing in community.

…tsk tsk….and I am one of them, and given the income I am not sure I would do any better….