LAUGH. IT’S THE CREDIT CRUNCH

On reading the above statement, the majority of you, especially those who have been sacked, or about to be sacked not to mention those being turfed into the street by banks eager to repossess their homes, will probably come to the conclusion that the SOB has finally lost his marbles and should be sectioned, better still, tarred and feathered before being run out of town. But, bare with me, there is a logic behind my inflammatory statement. Not my logic you understand, but that of a certain female journalist.

The above mentioned lady, writing in one of the posher Sunday papers, was waxing lyrical on her liberation from the bonds of fashion by the advent of the credit crunch. The entire article was an illumination of the most blinding brilliance, of how remote our metropolitan elite are from the rest of us.

Miss Marrin, for that is her name, started by rejoicing that with hard times cavorting down Oxford Street like a whore with her knickers in the pawn shop, she no longer had to go shopping. Now call me thick if you must, but I was unaware that prior to the banking crisis, people were being frog marched into Selfridges at the working end of a shot gun and forced to blow their brass on things they do not need or want but think they should have in order to impress the neighbours. This is the nub of Miss Marrin’s dilemma, she felt she had to spend relentlessly so as not to fall behind the Joneses in the social steeple chase which is life in fashionable London.

Miss Marrin was also ecstatic over the fact that financial constraints meant that she no longer had to change the wall paper every five minutes in an effort to be abreast of every new fad drifting through the virtual reality that is Notting Hill. Poor lamb, my heart bleeds for her, well, it would if I had one, but then bleeding hearts and I have never really got on together, not that I would get on at all with Miss Marrinn who receives large amounts of money for writing the sort of shite which ruins the Sunday mornings of ordinary folk.

Now I fully recognise that what the accused actually wrote was very much a tongue in cheek journalistic piece, and should not be taken too seriously, or should it? Miss Marrin is all too representative of the metropolitan elite who live in a world ring fenced by arrogance from the real world we the unenlightened majority inhabit, and as such is a danger to the rest of us. When governments talk of public opinion, it is the opinion of the intellectual nomenclatura it is referring to, these isolated beings who fret over whether the pattern on the wall paper is out of date, it is they who decide what the rest of us think, or to be more precise have arrogated to themselves this right.

What is to be done to right this situation? Short of a bit of revolution nothing, the Tabithas and Jontys of Islington have the Nation by the short and curlies and display no inclination to let go any day soon. I suppose I could take a lone stand and strike a blow against the tyranny of the smug, but what the hell, who would listen to me? I’ll content myself with toddling of to Harvey Nicks for some sushi.