Always with you?
Apparently Edwina Currie has been thoroughly noxious to some poor family in a radio phone-in programme by expressing her belief that they brought it upon themselves by living high on the hog.
I have cited this before: my feelings for Dickens are ambiguous in the extreme (have just set up the nomination post for a
codswallopers Dickens bicentenary codslapping poll), both as a writer and as a man. But still, he did sometimes whack a necessary nail bang on its head: in Little Dorrit, through the mouth of one of the characters he had this to say:
[T]hat man (Mr Plornish gave it as his decided belief) know'd well that he was poor somehow or another, and you couldn't talk it out of him, no more than you could talk Beef into him. Then you see, some people as was better off said, and a good many such people lived pretty close up to the mark themselves if not beyond it so he'd heerd, that they was 'improvident' (that was the favourite word) down the Yard. For instance, if they see a man with his wife and children going to Hampton Court in a Wan, perhaps once in a year, they says, 'Hallo! I thought you was poor, my improvident friend!' Why, Lord, how hard it was upon a man! What was a man to do? He couldn't go mollancholy mad, and even if he did, you wouldn't be the better for it. In Mr Plornish's judgment you would be the worse for it. Yet you seemed to want to make a man mollancholy mad. You was always at it-if not with your right hand, with your left. What was they a doing in the Yard? Why, take a look at 'em and see. There was the girls and their mothers a working at their sewing, or their shoe-binding, or their trimming, or their waistcoat making, day and night and night and day, and not more than able to keep body and soul together after all-often not so much.
How destitute does destitution have to be before it is properly deserving?
I would also like to invoke, yet again, the following conversation attributed to Dr Johnson and another:
What signifies," said someone, "giving a half pence to common beggars? They only lay it out on gin and tabacco".
[He responded]
"And why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence?"
Meanwhile, if you have the money to spend on it, you may blow it on a meal which will not even be enjoyable at a new restaurant in Mayfair: which Jay Rayner says is massive, expensive, and the food is shocking and John Lanchester describes as a 'dog's dinner': and both comment that nonetheless it is full.
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