Friday, and I wake to the sound of my daughter heading off to work and get up to find my partner getting ready to visit her mother with her brother. This means that once I have downed my breakfast, coffee and meds I have the house to myself. There are chores to do before I can indulge. Today is “read your meters” day and get the readings to the energy supplier to ensure you do not get stiffed on the new prices as from tomorrow. I read our meters and note them down before logging onto my suppliers app. While I am inputting my data I notice that the amount of credit we have suddenly drops. When I check and do the maths it turns out that my supplier has just taken the remaining period of the old price (pre-Putin) in readiness to charge me the new Putin rates as from tomorrow. In doing so a communist tyrant will enable my energy supplier to make obscene excess profits, which this pox ridden government is going to let them keep, whilst the energy executives piss themselves with joy at the tax cut the same pox ridden government has just given them. Cannot help wondering what Truss’s head would look like on a spike.
I move on to the next item on my to do list, which is to clear the kitchen followed by sticking a load of washing in the machine. This done I can indulge in an extravagant bath. There is nothing like the opulence of a good bath. I imagine such luxury will become rarer in the Putin polluted future. Whilst in the bath I continue to read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It is a remarkable book and in many ways before its time. It captures the working classes (or in Americas case, the poor) aspirations and the recognition that education is the pathway to them. There was a section where the main character starts their first job. A mindless manual job of winding paper onto wire to form a stem for someone else to attach petals to. At this point she has the following realisation:
“”This could be a whole life,” she thought. “You work eight hours a day covering wires to earn money to buy food and to pay for a place to sleep so that you can keep living to come back to cover more wires. Some people are born and kept living just to come to this. Of course, some of these girls will marry, marry men who have the same kind of life. What will they gain? They’ll gain someone to hold conversations within the few hours at night between work and sleep.” But she knew the gain wouldn’t last. She had seen too many young working couples who, after the children came and the bills piled up, rarely communicated with each other except in bitter snarls. “These people are caught” she thought. “And why? Because (remembering her grandmother’s repeated conviction), they haven’t got enough education,” Fright grew in Francie. Maybe it would be so that she’d never get to high school; maybe she’d never have more education than she had at that moment. Maybe all her life she’d have to cover wires…cover wires…”
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Betty Smith pp358.
I remember having this exact experience in my late teens as I stood behind a Post Office counter amid my fellow counter clerks of many years and heading for retirement. In my case I had 1 O level and was desperate to go to university because I knew that it was my way out of “covering wires”. Like Francie I had parents that had educational aspirations. In Francie’s case her family had read a page of the bible and a page of Shakespeare every day and she had learned to love reading. My parents took us to concerts and art galleries, which was lucky as I am dyslexic (I was the one at the back doing raffia work while others learnt things) but I got the message that there was a world of culture and learning that could lift me out of where I was. I thought if I had a degree, I had a meal ticket for life. As it turned out I needed two. The fact that this was all seen and written about in 1944, four years before I was born, I find incredible. The fact that somehow in every generation there are those of us lucky enough to realise what our way out is and to be able to achieve it, while others either never have the realisation or for whatever reason are unable to take that path, is what inspires some of us to fight.
That was a lot to appreciate in one bath time. I got out of cold water slightly wrinkly and got on with stuff. I hang my washing up, checked the hedgehog food and the garden camera. The scrofulous black and white cat from next door continues to plunder the hedgehog food. I have ordered cat “prickles” and hope to construct a workable deterrent to the cat. I eat lunch and settle down to some domestic comfort as the rain lashes down outside. The garden camera can go out tomorrow. My partner returns from seeing her mother and we sort out her mother’s meter readings and look at her energy usage. There is something awry and we start the process of communicating with a chat bot. So the early evening heaves into view and I start to draft the blog, while my eldest daughter makes her way home in the rain and my partner contemplates making tea. In an act of pre-Putin gas prices, we put the heating on, we’ll show the bastard we can’t be bullied, this is another cold war he will lose.
