Wednesday, June 18, 2008

On your mettle

Is it just me or are a lot of people seeming almost to be looking forward to hard times ahead? It is not just that most ordinary people seem to be convinced that they are going to be hard, they seem almost to relish the idea that they are going to be tested, to see what they can do in adversity

As Patrick Hosking said in the Times, anyone under the age of 35 (in this country at least) simply has no experience of a world where credit is not plentiful & cheap.

That makes me feel very old, but younger people also seem almost to want some such experience. Just as the sons of men who fought in WW2 often wonder, half wistfully, how they would have survived that challenge.

I even heard one young woman say We know we’ve just been spending it on piles of tat, & it has not made us happy




Neither can we call this a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves but must fetch in more from the next house, taking upon us the misery of our neighbours - John Donne