The nostalgia of debt

Read about someone who was on the programme ‘Benefit Busters’ on Channel 4 Thursday night. Apparently they had managed to run up debts of £75000, on their credit cards. People like this hold a strange fascination for me. On one hand, there is the question of when did these people think they would be prepared to pay it all back. On the other, there is the sense of what it must be like to run up debts like that and not worry about the consequences. I know that I would never ever be as stupidly reckless as that. Yet it’s the lure of being able to have what you want right now and to be able to block the consequences of the debt out.

Yet every time these sort of high profile spenders turn up on TV, on programmes like ‘Spendaholics’, the total gains of these debts always seem so little. Nights out, shoes, handbags, designer label gear, electronic goods. Admittedly, to the person who spent so much on them, it doesn’t feel that way. Of course this may be completely academic now. All these stories about ordinary people who ran up fortunes in debts on credit cards, feel like the product of a more optimistic time, even though they weren’t really. It’s like people stuck in the Great Depression, remembering all the great parties they had in the roaring twenties.

Did some reading about Prostate cancer as my father is going to have to undergo surgery for it. Found the web address of a charity, but it’s no good giving that to him. He refuses to even look at computers. As far as he is concerned, the answering machine is technology gone mad.