Silver Spoons

The Ladybird Guide to Being Stuck Up

This is Charles. Charles is posh. Charles is sad. We must all feel sad for Charles. He is so sad he has been interviewed about his sadness in a newspaper. You can read his sad story in full here, but the easy version is on this page. Poor Charles.

Charles made a lot of money buying up all the properties in a little town called Barnsley. Even though the houses were quite cheap, the local people couldn't afford to buy them, because men like Charles have pushed the prices up. He made millions of pounds but it still wasn't enough for him. Poor Charles.

Charles is greedy. Charles decided to gamble all his money, and his lovely house, on making even more millions of pounds in another place where houses are quite cheap. This place is called Romania. The plan did not work out. Poor Charles.

Charles has lots of children. The children are posh too. They like doing posh things, going to posh schools, wearing posh clothes and living in a posh house.

All Charles has left now is 84 houses in Barnsley, a mansion and 214 acres in the countryside, lots of expensive things, his health, his wife, his children and his dog. Poor Charles.

Charles and his family are sad because now they will have to live like ordinary people. They will have to wear ordinary clothes and shop for ordinary food in ordinary supermarkets. They draw the line at going to ordinary schools or meeting ordinary teenagers, this is too, too much and will compromise their poshness. Poor Charles.

Charles is too posh to work in an ordinary job. His wife Iona is too posh to work in an ordinary job. His grown-up son is too posh to work in an ordinary job. His teenage daughters are too posh to have ordinary Saturday jobs. They are not eligible to claim benefits like ordinary people because they have 84 houses. Poor Charles.

They cannot face having lodgers in their enormous house. Lodgers might be ordinary. Charles might have to sell his big house and move to an ordinary one. He might have to live in one of his 84 other houses in Barnsley. He might have to live like the other people who live in Barnsley. Poor Charles.

Extra information: you can click to read about poor families in Barnsley.

Mucking Out

We live like pigs, and it just can't carry on. There is too much mess everywhere, too much STUFF. I reckon it makes us all stressed because we can never find anything we need. And I think we waste money buying duplicates of things we've already got (music books, CDs, school uniform items).

I found a brand-new unworn pair of ballet shoes in a box yesterday, in the size I was just about to go and buy at the weekend. And two copies of the same CD because we bought one then forgot we bought it or thought it was lost or something then bought another one. I reckon we have two million navy blue pony-tail holders in this house.

We did a lot of tidying up over Christmas, which made the place look much better. But now we've begun to tackle the mess at a deeper more fundamental level and it's made it all untidy again as we move stuff from one room to another, put things into archive boxes, transfer stuff to bags for the second-hand shop.  Stuff, stuff, stuff.

I want to live in the Barcelona Pavilion with only a toothbrush, iPod and Kindle. Although in truth I don't think books and CDs count as stuff. They count as essential items. It's just the rest of the stuff I can't bear.  Every time I take something to the dump or the hospice shop my soul feels a little lighter.

Isn't it a Buddhist thing, this detachment from the material world? Maybe I'll be finding my spiritual side this year as part of my journey. You have permission to kill me, though, if I Find The Lord (or if He finds me).

A Nice Piece of Wensleydale

I am reliably informed (by the respected authority of the Daily Hate, no less) that cheese is the most shoplifted item of 2011. How much of this lies at the feet of Anthony Worrall-Thompson, filmed stealing cheese from his local Tesco on five occasions in the last fortnight, they did not say.

It's not suprising to me, though, that contraband cheese is in such high demand. I don't believe that the gods would have supped on something as sickly and sugared as ambrosia when they could have been tripping out on casomorphin.

It's not surprising to me, either, that the addictive properties of cheese rival that of nicotine and morphine. Apparently it also makes you want to eat other things too. Cheese and bread. Cheesy pasta. Cheesy mashed potato. Cheese and onion pasty. The cheese-carb combo can take many forms, all of them rather wonderful.

I can't eat any of these things now. Actually I can't eat anything at all for a while.  Since I have a lifetime's-worth of cheesy-carb abuse stacked about my body, this shouldn't present too much of a problem energy-wise. It fits very well with my 2012 reinvention  -  I'm going to be amazing.

And in the meantime, I'm going to be cultivating a taste for consomme.

Forceful

I spent some time thinking. Resting, building up my strength, putting my stuff in order.  I wanted to be ready for this year, to look it in the eye, to square up to it. One main resolution: not to have a year like last year.

Let's summarise so we can put that year to bed. Began the year in a slough of despond on anti-depressants. Filed a loss in my business for the first time this century. Had more radiotherapy on my cervix. Stumbled over my husband fucking one of my friends in our office. Put the holding company into administration. Discovered a big lump in my neck. All this against the backdrop of massive global recession, riots, and the stress and misery and illness and death of my friends. Hurrah for 2011. Not.

However I survived all these things and got my act back together, and I ended the year feeling surprisingly good.

And that is the last looking-back I'm going to do. 2012 is going to be a good year. It's going to be a year in which I make lots of positive changes in all sorts of areas of my life. I'm more than ready. I'm excited, energised, full of life and optimism. Watch me catch fire  -  this year is the year of new beginnings, of transformation.

I'll keep listening to Ripley, of course. But this year I think I'm going to be mentored by Yoda, since he's wise and calm, and I like his advice on making things happen.

Do or do not. There is no "try".