In 1985, a year after I started my first job, I bought myself a house. I could only afford it because unemployment locally was so high that half the town was trying to move away. In fact my mortgage payments on the house in Shotton were slightly less than rent on a bedsit in neighbouring Chester. The catch, of course, was that the bedsit was furnished and the house wasn’t.
It was a stretch to find money for furniture, but I’d been brought up with a healthy respect for the power of compound interest, and I was determined not to acquire big debts. So I knew exactly when the billing period of my credit card ended each month,and how much I could spend and still pay it off in full at the end of the period. For over a month, I sat on a rickety tea-chest, because I didn’t have a chair. But I was saving for my future, so I knew it was worth it.
One day, driving home, the radio program had a segment about people who’d got thousands of pounds into debt, furnishing their holiday homes. Not the place they lived most of the time, their holiday homes. And not a couple of hundred quid either. Thousands. And the tone of the programme implied that I was supposed to feel sorry for these rich idiots.
I switched over to to the tape player, without looking to see which tape it was, just to shut up the radio.
And it was The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. “Money, it’s a hit. Don’t give me that do good, good bullshit. I’m in the two car, caviare, four star travelling section…”
I laughed so hard I had to pull over.
R.I.P. Richard Wright, keyboard player for Pink Floyd.
