Bitter creative class
When people see how shabby you look, they tend to regard it as artifice. Although you’d never admit it, they’re wrong. It’s all economy. Except for the waistcoats.
You never thought it would be this way, but every choice you have made since turning 18 has somehow managed to limit your financial potential. While your friends were all sailing out of your perfectly decent university into law school or jobs in finance, you opted to do something “creative”. After only ten years as an academic, or a minor playwright, or a poet, or a freelance cartoonist, or a backroom milliner, you were already beginning to suspect you’d made a mistake.
That was when the brave among you switched to teaching. Now you live in a small, scruffy home in an inner city, largely because you couldn’t bear to be too far away from all the theatres and museums that you haven’t been able to afford to visit since Persephone (your second child) was born. Her brother, Roman, is now almost 7 and, although you swore that you never would, you’re starting to think you ought to send him to private school.
You’ll probably have to cut back on red wine, rolling tobacco, or the joints you still smoke at weekends, when the pair of them have gone to bed.
In truth, you ought to cut back on the books, which rise in columns through your house like crystals on a salt plain.
I can see it all now (except the tobacco). Especially the bits about the books. That’s what my room at uni looks like now. And my bedroom. And the living room at home, for goodness sake. Any room I come into contact with gets infested with books. That, and Elvis Costello CDs.
-posted by Roy.
