Charlotte Metcalf, Christmas and the Middle Classes

The trouble with being middle class is that you’re always expected to be going somewhere. If you’re not upwardly mobile then you are nothing and are probably in Britain’s 4th class characterised by joblessness for whatever reason.

Me? I am a 4th class citizen. Brought up in a broken middle class home from an early age with neither parent having anything like what you would call a proper job, dancing through bohemian and esoteric circles and never staying in one place very long, we were on and off poor but with wealthy expectations. I spent two years in a very expensive school and when that party was over paid for it with a couple of years of hell.

I’ll tell you what though: dinner table conversations were never dull. As a member of the 4th class, itinerant family friends are wasters and visionaries, artists and scientists, musicians and mystics; and it’s not uncommon to have people living in with you as their bipolar economies are on a down phase just as you live in with them when yours are.

I don’t know when I stopped enjoying Christmas. There was always a desire to buy us kids something nice, and sometimes there was the money to do so, other times we got nothing from a mother who was obviously crying about it in private while putting on a brave face in public. And I think that’s what Christmas has kept on meaning to me ever since: falseness. People pretending to be better off than they can afford to be, or happier than they are. Whatever it was, I knew in 1993 that I actually despise the whole thing and my last Christmas was in 1995 when I spent the few days with a friend and her family on the Sussex coast.

It’s one of those lifestyle choices that everyone feels they have the right to question you over, too. Like not having children of your own if you’re not gay and it’s somehow considered right to think it’s wrong, and that you can say so in exactly the same way that you can’t if you were talking about someone’s sexual orientation or faith without being called a bigot. There’s a lot of “Bah-Humbug” and “omg that’s so cliche” comments made, and recently I was asked if something had happened that caused my straying from the Christmas path. Well, no. Nothing really. I just loathe the whole thing and want no part in it.

“Cry ‘Bah Humbug’ if you must. Call me spoilt if you wish. But the fact is, I wish I could cancel Christmas.”

Thus writes one Charlotte Metcalf in a suitably vacuous pity-piece in the Daily Mail, Britain’s daily equivalent to Das Reich.

She has come under a certain amount of fire from that article as some people appear to have taken offence to it and judging by her comments on Twitter she doesn’t really understand why when she thinks people ought to be more sympathetic.

Well Charlotte, allow me to explain.

People love to see people they admire do well. We love a good success story when we think someone is better than us.

You cannot blame the economic downturn for your change in fortune, but you can blame it for your loss of income. I know it’s hard to make ends meet when nobody is hiring, nobody wants to pay for anything because they are in the same pinch as you.

The economic downturn did not cause your situation. Your situation caused the economic downturn. Every business venture and investment has risk attached to it, and what you failed to understand is that risk means that there is a very real possibility of loss, of failure. You started a venture and failed to budget for the length of time it takes to turn a new business into a profitable one, instead you frittered away your money on ribbons and over-extended yourself into a volatile property market. You borrowed too heavily and turned all your assets into liabilities.

You made the classic greed mistake in a peaking bull market. You don’t get sympathy from people because they do not feel your pain at no longer being able to afford to do your Christmas shopping at Harrods. Most people have never been able to afford that level of luxury, most people have never even been inside Harrods, let alone been able to shop there. A lot of us who have been inside that shop did so to many and various degrees of sneer from the sales staff and doorpeople, even if we were just there to interview for a job.

You don’t get sympathy because while people love to see someone they consider deserving of success attain it, the one thing they love more is watching someone they don’t consider to be deserving of it fail. That’s human nature, I’m afraid.

If it’s any consolation though, I really do feel sorry for your children.