The One Entirely Recession Proof Industry. Being Broke.

I don’t know about you, but I’m enjoying the Credit Crunch tremendously.

I have no savings – never had. Once I collected a King’s ransom in fifty pence and pound coins for the NSPCC by taking my cherubic visage door-to-door (risking exposure to paedophiles whilst raising money for children was an irony lost on me at the time) but that money was never my own - although I must confess - and please don’t judge too harshly – I dipped into it from time to time to aid my Arthurian quest to find the Newcastle United shiner in a packet of football stickers (the only conspiracy theory I fully believe is that Merlin deliberately distributed the David Ginolas and Phillipe Alberts South of the great divide and sent the Klinsmanns and Viallis in other direction to ensure 10 year old boys kept spending, charity fraud or no charity fraud).

I have no assets – never had. I don’t mean anatomically, where girly eye-lashes and a chopping-board stomach serve me reasonably well, but in terms of tangible things like property, or cars or signed first prints of any Harry Potter novels. I got so far once as to photograph odd bits of junk that lay around my room (a pocket calculator, a book on palm reading, an Our Lady Peace album) to sell on Ebay, caught in a similar rush of capitalist fervour that falls over people when playing Monopoly, only to be overcome swiftly by a crippling existential numbness as I contemplated the prospect of actually posting the silly things to Norwich all to make a couple of quid. It was too depressing, so I left the site and have never returned since, though I suspect my approval rating is the one area in which George W. Bush and I could empathise with one another.

I don’t drive so the price of fuel doesn’t bother me, don’t play the stock market so Sesame Street still seems more pertinent than Wall Street in my eyes (incidentally, I wonder how The Count is dealing with the downturn…). ‘When you aint got nothing, you got nothing to lose’ said Bob Dylan, presumably referring to the period before he was given the responsibility of embodying liberal social protest, something he’s seemed keen to try and shake off ever since. Well I still stumble through the final days of each month borrowing tenners from tolerant friends and have absolutely no mythical status as the embodiment of anything – I wonder if old Bob is jealous, in his own private way.

I have, however, adopted the parlance of the Credit Crunch, much like people who normally don’t have a clue which football club Wayne Rooney plays for suddenly had a line or two about his metatarsal and enduring significance to the England set up during the last World Cup.

I’ve been spraying banal conversations with the same guff about ‘things being as they are’ and ‘everyone being affected by it at the minute’ as everyone else (bollock by the way: I’m not affected, the Queen’s not affected, that bloke who wears newspaper for trousers and pushes a shopping trolley down Northumberland Street isn’t affected…), all delivered in that peculiar cadence that seeks to imitate a world-weary global businessman, rather than someone to whom the ‘FTSE Index’ sounds more like a brochure for frottage aficionados than something to do with finance.

If anything, the whole palaver seems like a good thing for my current situation. One thing I do find interesting is the concept of ‘this only happening once in a life-time’ – gives the whole thing a glossy touch, does that, like a nice quote on the front of a DVD. If it only happens once in a lifetime, then I’d rather it happened now before I have any dosh, assuming I ever manage to sell the novel I’m planning to write this summer (boy meets boy, boy loves girl, girl sleeps with other boy, boy cries) and see it turned into a moderately entertaining British film (starring Martin Clunes as my Dad – sorry, the Dad – sorry, Dad).

The person I feel most sorry for is all Barack Obama, who seemingly couldn’t have a worse shit-storm to enter for his first term as the sexiest, coolest (and certainly blackest) American president of all time.

Well, best of luck to him, and best of luck to all of you. For me it’s just another day whistling cheerfully, wading through my own rubbish bin.