Things were not looking good, I have to admit. The finances, I mean. A look at the bank balance strongly suggested that the final 16 days of the month were going to be limited to a £10-per-day budget. As an absolute bare minimum, £6.99 of that was going to be spent on wine, so this didn’t leave me with a lot of room for fun and games. There often comes a time of the month when I sigh and make a big pot of couscous (well, technically, the stew that goes on top of the couscous) and eat that for a number of days on end, because it is impossible to make fewer than four large servings at a time.
This time mine had to be vegetarian. The butchers at my local Middle Eastern grocers didn’t have any merguez sausages – oh, what a middle-class complaint that sounds – but just as well. They’re not expensive and they are delicious, but adding meat to the shopping list does bump up the cost somewhat. Make it veggie and we start approaching Lee Anderson MP’s ideal meal cost of 30p a serving. Not that he’d like such foreign muck. Especially vegetarian foreign muck. God, I hate Lee Anderson MP. I’ve just gone into a reverie of shoving his head into a large pot of harissa-flavoured chickpea and aubergine stew until he begs for mercy.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, being broke. Again. Having nothing fun to do of an evening, I settled down to work on a project, the details of which I will be vague about for the time being because I don’t want to jinx anything. I’d been late with this work, and the people at the other end were getting a bit frantic. It is one of those things where the best ideas come when you’re intoxicated, the catch being that you can’t actually do anything with these ideas until you’ve sobered up. Luckily, I’d made some notes while pissed for later use and for once I was able to read them the next day.
As it turned out, the people at the other end liked my work and this pleased me, because it would give me some leverage when it came to asking for some money. And so I did. Not a lot; just a little to take the edge off the pain for the rest of the month. You know, bring the budget up to £20 a day. December would present a similar problem to the second half of November but I’d tiptoe across that bridge when I came to it.
But then a miraculous thing happened: the people to whom I had sent this work responded to my request for some dosh eightfold. (Roughly.) At first I wondered if there had been some kind of mistake. Or whether this was a loan, or something with a sting in its tail. But no: they meant it, and I don’t have to pay it back.
This has changed everything. I imagine there are people for whom a grand is not a life-changing sum but for me it is transformational. It is almost like a religious experience. Damn it, it is a religious experience. Until then, I had been digging ever deeper into the pit of depression. To the point where it was becoming very dark indeed: I couldn’t see the sky. Literally: I had been spending most of the day in bed with the curtains drawn, and only summoning the will to get up by the time the light was fading. I had fallen into the trap of taking stock of my life. If the inventory is on the slim side, this can be unwise. The fact that the first week or so of November had been the darkest on record – about one hour of sunlight for the whole period, according to a weather map I saw on the internet – didn’t help one little bit.
But here I was, suddenly, and without any prior training, in funds. I am relieved of the incessant, humiliating nag, like a kind of pain, of being broke for the rest of the month. The first instinct, of course, is to blow the lot on hookers and fine Scotch whisky, but after a period of reflection I decided the best thing I could do would be to put some of it aside for the children’s Christmas presents. This is usually cash in the form of crisp new notes including a £50 one because that’s what they like. As there are three of them, this can take a big bite out of the finances – but this time I can do it painlessly.
There are other things I can do. I can put the heating on. (Only after 6pm; I’m not completely reckless.) I can buy a Chinese takeaway this evening. I can warm things up in the oven – hell, I could even cook them. I might score a pheasant from the posh butcher’s in Hove and round the meal off with some Stilton. I could go to the Regency and have a plate of oysters and a small glass of white wine. (This comes, as bitter experience has taught me, to £30 with a tip; and they’re still the best value in town.) I could even – and I feel giddy as I type these words – buy my bimonthly packet of tobacco without having to borrow money.
In related news, I saw that once again there is another feeble attempt to revitalise the idea of a universal basic income. One argument against this is that it will discourage people from working. Which is, unintentionally, a way of admitting: work is slavery. Do it or starve. Luckily for me, I like my work. But a little extra help from time to time wouldn’t go amiss.
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Combat Zone