Selfish Whining Monkeys: How we Ended Up Greedy, Narcissistic and Unhappy. Rod Liddle
you live in, or in the people who live around you, because you’re always ready to move on again, to buy bigger and better, and thus trouser more almost wholly imaginary money. And as a consequence, the poorest of us – an ever-growing proportion – are forced into private-sector lettings, because there are no council houses left.
Our infatuation with house prices is perhaps second only to the credit card as having had the most deeply corrosive effect upon what we – although obviously not Mrs Thatcher – might call society. And, much as with the credit card, you wonder how come my generation was so easily gulled, so taken in, and so mindless of the effect upon others. The rather sneering quotation at the beginning of this chapter is from John Betjeman, of course, bemoaning the fact that the lower-middle classes, the hoi polloi, the bald young clerks and their suburban wives, who do not know/the birdsong from the radio – were buying houses at all, ghastly little people that they were. This is pure snobbery, of course and we should not pay it much mind. But not all objections to the social calamities of the housing market should be so easily dismissed, even if that’s the familiar monetarist charge levelled against those who cavil: you are standing in the way of democracy’s perfect expression, the democracy of the free market; what right do you have to stop someone making money and, uh, bettering themselves? Ah, well, you’ve got me – none, in the end. I have no right, and so it will go on: even a catastrophic slump in the market dulls the appetite only briefly. My argument is simply that the fervid acquisitiveness has not made this country a better place in which to live; we are more estranged, physically and metaphorically, from one another than ever before.
Other stuff has also made us move around, here, there and everywhere. You might reasonably chuck into the mix the rather greater alacrity with which we got divorced, a number which has risen almost exponentially since the late 1960s. Divorce usually means someone moves out, unless you’re really weird, and often away from the area inhabited by their embittered or merely awkward former spouse. We also, since the 1970s, began to choose to live by ourselves at a younger and younger age (a process which may now be in reverse), and to demand more floor space for ourselves, because, hell, we deserve it. It is a fact not often remarked upon by the Green lobby that every single advance since 1970 in making houses more environmentally friendly – and there have been many such advances – has been entirely negated by the fact that we no longer wish to live with other people; that we want instead to curl ourselves in isolation, and fester. I don’t know why the Greens don’t make more of that; I suppose because it would require them to make non-pc judgments about how people live their lives, and we couldn’t have that.
There’s a new word the sociologists use to describe communities that recover quickly in the aftermath of catastrophe, economic or otherwise: they use the word ‘resilience’. I don’t know why, but this annoys me. It sounds like something they’ve just thought up, in a committee meeting, someone called Roz and someone called Hugo, delving around in their brains for some new concept to give to the world: resilience. Too often when they talk about resilience they mean nothing more than affluence: it will come as no surprise to you to learn that in a recent study by the Institute for Public Policy Research, Guildford emerged as more ‘resilient’ than Tower Hamlets. Well, fuck me sideways, etc. But I would bet that communities where the simple turnover in residencies is low tend to be more resilient than those in which the turnover is high, even once you have factored out differential income levels. I don’t know that for a fact, it’s just a guess. And I would guess too that there is some correlation with the crime rate.
I envy my mother and father the deep sense they had of always belonging to a community, the importance they put upon investing their time and effort in stuff like drama clubs and cub scouts. It is something I have largely neglected to do; I’ve never really been around anywhere long enough – it’s the sort of thing that requires commitment and longevity. There are still cub scout packs, of course, but many fewer than thirty or forty years ago. There are still amateur dramatic societies – but, again, fewer. The churches and the pubs have been closing down too.
So how do we occupy our increased leisure time now? After watching TV, the next most popular leisure activity is buying shit in shops. We like nothing more than wheeling a trolley around a huge shop and filling it up with shit. Retail outlets, malls, hypermarkets – you name it, we’ll spend a weekend buying shit in it. And the other thing we do these days, a growth industry almost on a par with buying bits of shit in shops – we go to the gym. We’ve replaced the communal with the solipsistic, the acquisitive and the narcissistic.
5
For death remembered should be like a mirror,
Who tells us life’s but breath, to trust it error.
William Shakespeare
Butterflies are always following me, everywhere I go.
Mariah Carey
The last thing I remember my mother ever saying to me was, ‘Rod, I’m frightened.’ She had terminal cancer, and what she was afraid of, reasonably enough, was dying imminently. She knew she was close to death, and so did I, and so did my dad and so did the doctors and nurses who attended to her in this harrowing room in the hospital in Cardiff. The room knew too. There was something about the room: its scrubbed beige implacability, its suffocating warmth, its watchfulness – somehow, in a way I can’t explain, its connivance, a connivance in the unending procession of death which it witnessed, the room from which nobody leaves alive, and with its terrible and pointless clinical appurtenances. She said this thing to me while I was sat at her bedside holding her hand, just ‘Rod, I’m frightened,’ and, emaciated and frequently delirious though she was, whacked out on the morphine and eaten away by the cancer, this brief and entirely rational admission seemed shocking, staggering even.
It was the first time it had been said aloud, the first time the death thing, the possibility of the death thing, had been admitted in the five years since the cancer – once supposedly eradicated – had made its inevitable triumphant return. The cancer she had first noticed on that pleasant afternoon in Wales, as we walked along the footpath, twelve years before. For the final three years of her life there was absolutely no doubt whatsoever about what the outcome would be, my father and I were assured; there would be no remission, there was nothing anyone could do, no drugs, no surgery: that, I’m afraid, they all said, sadly, shaking their heads, is that, sorry. Three years of quite explicitly terminal illness, but never admitted between us in the presence of my mum, even though of course she had been told the same thing by the surgeons. Never admitted, as if it were some kind of dirty secret, something shameful and pornographic. So when she said this thing about being frightened, I didn’t know what to do, how to respond. It was a sentence of ghostly clarity, it had a kind of supernatural force, as if it came from beyond her, and it left me speechless. The mantra had been the same for the last three years – Mum, you’re going to be fine.
That’s what we said. We chivvied her along, we patted and reassured and cheered and lied. And she lied back. We knew and she knew she was going to die soon – but the pretence was nonetheless kept up, all the way through; it was a kind of agreement. And so that’s what I said to her then, at the bedside, or words to that effect. ‘You’re going to be fine. Mum, don’t worry, you’ll get over this.’ You know the sort of thing? The sort of thing you say? Such a vapid and evasive lie when she wanted something better.
Only a few weeks before, she had collapsed at home and lay on the kitchen floor, paralysed. The doctor was called, along with an ambulance. ‘How are you feeling today, Margaret?’ the doctor enquired as she was being hoisted by three blokes onto a stretcher. ‘Lovely, thank you, doctor,’ she replied. ‘Lovely.’ There was no intended irony. Lovely. Top of the world. Never been better.
I remember plenty of times with my mum and dad when such reflexive or habitual stoicism seemed surreal, or idiotic. The refusal to admit to pain or distress in such extreme circumstances does not strike me as commendable – or, for that matter, useful. It is self-abnegation to the point of lunacy, isn’t it? But the last thing you wanted to do if you were my mother, or my