Is it better or worse to be young in a depression?  It seems unfair.  Here we are in the golden time, all bright-eyed, muscled, sharp of mind and full of ambition, stymied (they say) by a nonexistent job market and an economy made of dust and dreams gone bad.  Aren’t things hard enough–haven’t they always been hard enough?  Shouldn’t I resent the fact that I’m meeting economical adversity at every corner, that it’s no longer about glory but about staying alive?

Except that I hardly notice there’s a recession on.  I was always bound to be poor at this stage of my life.  I’m a student and a writer with an allergy to the kind of ambition that lands you prematurely in a London high-rise, rising at 5, only at home in a suit.  We could be experiencing the biggest economic boom of the last 100 years and I’d still be seated in my humble study writing for free, living off tea, love, the kindness of others, and a patchy income that falls somewhere below the poverty line.  And I’ll tell you what else.  I’d rather be struggling now, rationing extravagance and soothing myself with cheap cider, than struggling later, with a family, maybe, a career to worry over, a house, roots stretched tight.

Strange to say, but we may be lucky after all, to experience the relative poverty of youth alongside the actual poverty of this downturn, recession, depression, whatever it turns out to be.  The manor house can wait.

❧

This week has probably not been one of the finest of my entire existence. I promise this won’t be one of those whiny “everything’s gone to shit” posts, but I fell down the stairs at work yesterday. FELL DOWN THE STAIRS. Just saying.

I was reading the paper. I should have known not to do this, as once, when I was about six, I was reading a book whilst walking down the street with my Dad, when all the sudden a parking meter sprung from the earth and hit me in the face and I fell down, but it’s not an excuse anyway. I tripped over my own feet with about three stairs to go, and stopped my fall by hitting my head on the wall in front of me. I was so surprised by this that I couldn’t decide if I should cry or laugh or what, so I just gathered myself up and pressed a palm to the painful part of my head. After a little while it occurred to me that I was just standing on the landing with one hand clapped to my head, looking loony, and that maybe I should move, so I took my hand away from the bump and saw blood. Well, head wounds do that, I thought calmly, and I went upstairs to the staff toilet and splashed water on my face.

All well and good, but by the time I had got back down to the office again, it was bleeding again. I should mention that it wasn’t bleeding profusely, not by any means. More just…seeping. So when a co-worker asked idly if I’d hit my head, I said, yeah, I fell down the stairs, and giggled, and she said Oh my gosh, you mean right now? Because your head is bleeding.

Well, that was it. I could no longer pretend that my clumsiness was casual. Instead, I had to go across the road and get ice from the kitchen. Only they had no ice, so the chef brought me a plastic bag full of frozen corn. My boss wanted to bandage it to my head so that my arm wouldn’t get sore holding it there, but I drew the line at being an English patient lookalike. After a half hour of idleness I put a plaster over the cut and threw myself (metaphorically, not literally) back at my work.

I felt fine, and I wasn’t prepared to linger for long on the incident, especially not as it highlighted an example of stupendous ineptitude. But after ten thousand questions, expressions of sympathy, Natasha Richardson comparisons, and suggestions that I drink a little less at work (I don’t drink at all at work, in case you’re tempted to take that literally), I began to fret. It doesn’t take much to make me fret (I suffer, after all, from varying degrees of generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and hypochondria, which is a common but very unfortunate combination of ailments), and the internet, let me tell you, is the jackpot of fret-fuel.

So if you ever wanted to know what could possibly happen to you if you hit your head, causing your brain to strike your skull and begin bleeding, look it up online and then PANIC. By the time I got home to the Man, I was a proper wreck. “I don’t want to die because I fell down the stairs,” I sobbed at him, in his arms. He (and everyone else) had already asked me if I felt dizzy, nauseous, if I’d blacked out, if I had any symptoms whatsoever of a series injury, and the answer was no, I don’t think so, but the problem was of course that by that time I’d worked myself up so much that I did feel a bit dizzy just from the worry.

“Don’t worry,” he said to me, after I’d convinced him to help me look up head injuries online, after we’d ruled out together the possibility of concussion, “You’re going to be fine.” I decided to start blaming everyone else for my panic. “I wasn’t worried until everyone else started saying things,” I said, which was true, to an extent.

Having dramatized the event as much as possible, I decided it was finally time to settle down, take some Paracetemol, have some dinner, relax, and practice how I was going to tell this story to people in the days to come. I decided to acknowledge the fact that actually, I hadn’t hit my head that hard; that by now, the only sore part of me (besides my ego) was the bit of broken skin at my temple. I decided all this was easier, in fact, than working myself up into an epic panic.

My relaxation was aided by a solid hour spent reading passages from Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, which sounds dull until you realize that they’re riddled with gems like this one: “‘That queer-looking man seems to like Dick,’ said Anne.”

***

And then I awoke the next day and in spite of a distinct tenderness near the wound, felt good, until my spirits were dampened by the din of the bills in the study, clamoring to be paid. I would pay you, I told them sternly as I tried to find an unoccupied slice of desk on which to put my tea and branflakes, if I could pay you, but you insist on being so large as to be unmanageable. In response, they just moaned some more, and huffed, and one or two even did a little angry jig atop my computer.

To ease my guilt and shut them up, I paid my half of the rent and my portion of the gas bill, which made me feel momentarily better, until I realized that I’m just about at the end of my coping-tether. The catalyst for this realization was the knowledge that I’d been wrongly charged £20 by a broken cashpoint in Fulham. For an instant I blamed Fulham (maybe the big smoke, knowing I’ve rejected it as a place to live, is somehow out to get me), but I couldn’t hide for long from the fact that I’m a postgraduate student living in a graduate’s world. I’m ignoring the credit crunch, the recession, the big scary black monster in the corner, whatever you want to call it, because my problems are deeper than that.

Here’s how it is: I reached a point today where I no longer understood how I could go on like this. It baffled me, this realization. I actually sat down on the couch and pondered it. Because I’ve never been happier, emotionally, fundamentally. I have someone to love, and who loves me, and we live in a beautiful city and do beautiful (if not very lucrative) things, and our life is both exciting to me and soothing, gentle. But here I was on a glorious March morning wondering how we were going to pay those loud bills in the study after all, how, indeed, I was going to pay for groceries and to have the heel stuck back onto my boot and to get my coat, now impossibly soiled, dry-cleaned, how I was going to buy laundry detergent, do all of the little things that require money.

It’s not that I don’t work, it’s that I don’t work enough–but I can’t work more, without sacrificing my masters degree (and, also, the legality of my visa–not to mention my sanity). In that bleak moment I couldn’t stop myself from wondering if my fall down the stairs was not symbolic in some way, if perhaps I am not only falling but also hitting a wall in my work, my career (my career? What career?), my financial well-being.

But then, this evening at university, a successful and well-respected novelist began his chat with us by recounting how just yesterday, he’d been walking down his street, head turned, distracted by the for-sale signs on a pair of houses, when suddenly he smacked into the side of a metal pole, and look at the mark on the side of my head, he said.

So real writers have those moments too. And anyway, the really annoying thing about not having any money isn’t not being able to pay the bills; it’s not being able to buy the Man a really super birthday present.

❧

If I wasn’t already consumed every moment by anxiety, I would be by now. Even The Guardian had a “Crisis Special!” in its Money section. When The Man’s parents dropped by yesterday evening for tea, pizza, and some draught excluding, his mother casually wondered if the credit crunch was going to impact people’s essential curiosity (actually she’d wondered if it was going to impact the success of TV show/business QI, but as I’d just suggested that the reason such an enterprise works is because of people’s endless craving for knowledge, it was as good as).

If I played a drinking game–one sip for every time the word “crisis” comes up–I’d be pissed before breakfast. If I got a penny for every time, I’d be rich–but that wouldn’t be very credit-crunch-likely, would it.

So, all this in mind, alongside my constant awareness that I am a relatively new adult and, as such, perpetually poor, I volunteered to invigilate the SAT examination yesterday at St. Clare’s. As one of my co-workers put it: “It’s mind-numbingly boring, but by midday, you’ll have made £50.” Every word of that is true.

What my co-worker couldn’t have predicted, however, were the flashbacks. I took the SATs, you see, not so very long ago (although long enough ago for me to have forgotten how many HOURS the process takes), and trapped in a room with fifty-odd teenagers and their No. 2 pencils, it’s impossible not to remember the Dunn School edition of the same exams.

Then, I remember envying the proctors. At least they’re not taking this god-awful test, I thought. Yesterday I would gladly have taken the test. At least they’ve got something to do, I thought enviously of the students. I kept having what I believed to be brilliant wisps of thought, one-after-the-other, but as I had no way to write these thoughts down, they’ve all gone. I’m a writer, not a thinker, you see. To fill the expanses of time, I started coming up with names for the students. I played with my bracelets, my ring, my earrings, and it occured to me that possibly jewlery was actually invented not to adorn women but to give them something to amuse themselves with. I lamented the fact that my new wool tights are a full size too big, and therefore slightly saggy at the knees. I stared deep into the eyes of the two enormous drawings of handsome, well-cheekboned youths, and tried to decipher if the one on the right was a boy or a girl (the lips were all woman, but the nose unmistakably masculine). I got very, very hungry.

When I was taking the same exams at 16, I was as these students yesterday were: nervous and well-behaved. The SATS are designed, I’m convinced, to make pupils so anxious about whether or not they’re filling in the tiny answer bubbles correctly or have written their name down correctly that they forget anything they’ve ever known about reading, writing, and mathematics. “Nervous and well-behaved,” I said to my father when he asked me how the students had been (“Did you catch any cheaters?” he wanted to know, but the closest I’d come was having to tell an especially anxious-looking girl that she couldn’t have her ruler on the desk. “Why not?” she rightly asked, and for some reason, although it would have been completely out of character, I desperately wanted to tell her: “Them’s the rules, sweetheart. Them’s the rules.” Instead, I shrugged and apologized six thousand times.) “Gee, who does that sound like?” he said back.

Nervous and well-behaved. Yep, that was me at 16. For the entire third year of high school, I moved around with tiptoes and whispers. Constantly afraid. I don’t remember taking the SATs; but I remember dreading them. I remember finishing them and thinking, well, thank God that’s done, now I can actually get on with my life. I had stopped caring about my scores long ago–all that mattered was that I put the experience behind me.

Yesterday, I walked out of the testing room enveloped in an early-afternoon gust of wind, cycled into town, and flopped down exhausted next to The Man while we waited for lunch.
“I feel like I’ve just taken a test,” I told him. By evening I was so weary that I didn’t know what to do with myself. To counter my oncoming headache, I went for a run, but it started to rain middway through and by the time I’d gotten home again I was drenched, so I took a bath and finished a particularly mindless book, and ate cold pizza whilst browsing through vintage clothing online. I tried to have a glass of wine, but after a few sips I was too sleepy to go on, and crawled upstairs to wait for The Man to come home from work. Cash crisis. Energy crisis.

❧

I think it’s time for me to come clean about something–and I may as well do it publicly, because as many times as I tell myself in private, it never quite seems to sink in.

Here it is: I’m shit with money.

I’m not, like some of the best minds of my generation, mired in student loans, or credit card debt. No. The problem is that it isn’t that simple. I don’t owe anyone money; I have enough stored up to get by, and though I’m in a bubble of unemployed bliss at the moment, I have the capacity to get a job and keep it. I have a university degree and am on my way to another. If you put all that together, it spells someone grounded, someone with a stock of cash in a bank somewhere and a clear sense of how to budget.

At the very least, it spells someone who’s been given a chance at a clean financial slate. And that’s just it: for no good reason at all, I’ve blown my chance. Is it because I’m a girl? I never can resist that cute new dress in the window, or the perfect handbag, or the must-have shoes of the season. I think garments have my name on them (and some of them, as you’ll see from the picture, literally do!). Or is it because I’m young and carefree? I like being able to buy a round of drinks at the pub or a meal out for no good reason. Maybe it’s because the exchange rate is painfully not in my favor, or because I spent three months a year ago living abroad off my savings and nothing else. Maybe it’s because, for whatever reason, I’m more afraid of stinginess than starvation.

Fundamentally, I think it’s because it’s hard to think of myself as poor when I live like I do. I don’t just mean that I feel rich, emotionally–I do, but that isn’t the point. The point is that I have a sleek apple laptop, and a digital camera, and expensive jeans, and the two of us live in a three bedroom, two-storey house with an expanse of garden out back and four fireplaces. We jet off to California for a month and though I cringe at the $1,000 tickets (nearly twice what I paid just six months ago) I pay up anyway–cringing is a very different thing, after all, from not being able.

I sometimes don’t know how to reconcile the financial reality of my life with my life itself: how is all of this possible when we pay our rent late every single month because we always just barely have enough? Once, in a money-induced panic, we looked at moving, but it isn’t significantly cheaper to rent a shabby bedsit, and we came to the conclusion that the problem is us, not where we live.

What frightens me is that there’s a point where it stops being the relative poverty of youth–a glamorous poverty, if there can be such a thing, a state of lacking in which you feel the pressure not as a weight but as an incentive, a driving force–and becomes simple poverty. The possibility that we might actually run out of money completely–no longer cringing, simply unable–is real, and only gets realer with each month, each year, each pound spent. If I know what my life looks like from the outside in, and I know that I love it, how do I preserve it?

I don’t know if it’s possible to feel the grip of seriousness until it’s too late–having never known before what life looks like with an utterly empty bank account, I go on living as if I never will know, and hope that I won’t.

❧

I think we sometimes don’t use our cities (or towns, or environments, even) enough. But here it is: when you’re utterly broke, suddenly, as shop doors shut fast in your face, something else opens itself up to you, something infinately more mutable than that infrastructure which requires coinage in exchange for patronage. No wonder artists are so oft referred to as “starving”. Really maybe it is the other way round: as in, they are artists because they are poor, not poor because they are artists living in a cold, hard, businessman’s world.

And while they will likely not be poor forever, once the spaces in which they inhabit have conspiratorioally revealed their (free) secrets, they will never go back to being not-artists, even if, in their newfound comfort, they cease to create, in the conventional way that artists do.

And maybe we are all artists, us who live in urban areas, wan with rent-worry; us privilaged youth whose poverty is so relative, so (hopefully) fleeting. We are space-artists: innovative out of necessity, rewarded for our troubles by the warmth of golden sandstone walls at our backs in Radcliffe Square and the luxury of watching people. We decorate the city with our lithe bodies strewn in bathing-suited beauty across the parks in sunshine, with the elegant folds of our legs as we perch on stone steps to have a sandwhich and a can of cider before the sun dips behind the last Oxford college and affords us a darkness under which to hide.

“We always seem to have money for the pub,” he says wonderingly one hot May night. I joke that it’s because this is the only thing that can give us comfort in these dark, broke times, but we both know this isn’t true–everything gives us comfort, just as everything weighs us down. The relative poverty of youth: living to the rhythms of payday, of bills, of knowing without a shadow of a doubt that it is temporary and that we should enjoy it, in our weird way, whilst we can, because while there is shrouded glamour in a bit of leanness, there is little poetry in being always able to afford…

(oh yes, I do say this to comfort myself, a little–but also because it is true)

And in the meantime, we use the city–we’re not just passing through–it’s ours. Not rich, indeed!

❧