Are people in denial? Do they really think that the winter is going to be just another season? Why isn’t there much more outrage at the threat of heat/food/accommodation poverty that IS going to take out a chunk of the population not only in the UK but also here in Catalonia?
It is easy in an affluent seaside resort like one in which I live to see little evidence of deprivation. The shops are open and seem to be doing well, people are coming in their drove to the beaches and exclusive new development along part of the beachfront is full steam ahead.
And I suppose that is part of the point. If you have money then much of the hand to mouth poverty is going to pass you by.
Am I going to stop plonking my bum on my expensive opera seat for the next season? No. Not yet.
But do I notice that even casual spends in the supermarket now always seem to be 100 euros and above?
Yes. 50 euros used to be enough to fill my tank, now it comes nowhere near. My rent will be increased by the cost of living rise in percentage terms; my income will not. If I wish to continue my present standard of living, then my pension will have to be augmented by dipping into my savings. I tell myself, that savings are there to be used not to be mindlessly horded – as if I have ever had wallet that didn’t have scorch marks on it from the money burning its way through!
I am by no means rich, but I also do not want to plead poverty. I am aware of the increasing costs of everything and acutely aware of the diminution in the adequate provision of those social services that I have paid for throughout my life through taxes etc.
My expectations (as a complacent Baby Boomer) are for my path through life to be relatively smooth (free education up to university level; job for life; pension; health care etc.) and I have little to complain about when I look back. But the future is different. Fixed income and rising costs are not good companions – and as I am reliant on my pension, government talking about the difficulties of maintaining the present levels of payment and then talk of different rates and speculation about not keeping to past rules are all things that concentrate the mind.
The crisis of Covid was, while it was going on (and as long as you were careful, and lucky!) a fairly placid disaster. Stuck at home, washing your hands like a fully conscious Lady Macbeth, finding ways to stay sane and waiting for things to get better. The worry was not paying for things, but rather getting your hands on them. It was almost as if time and the economy were in abeyance. It was a period of waiting and hoping for something not to happen.
That was then and this is now. The idiocy of Brexit and its inevitable deleterious consequences; the catastrophe of the pointless invasion of Ukraine; the failure of normal politics; the lingering after-shock of Covid; the stuttering and virtual collapse of social services – a catalogue of horror and despair.
Yet the sun is shining and people are on the beach and in the cafes having a good time. Because now, during the holidays, the summer holidays, is not the time to be thinking about the harsh realities that are going to hit, hard, in the autumn.
In T S Eliot’s much quoted (and more often misquoted) “Human kind cannot bear very much reality” from The Four Quartets, he accurately summarises the tendency for us all to avoid those things that are difficult to take in or accept. We like our dystopias and Armageddons to be narrative devices in stories or films rather than what’s going to happen in the next few months.
We are going to have to bear it!
