Class Takes Character

Class takes character, they say. Who says? Nobody says. Maybe he’d just made it up. Davie Swillings could do that: he could make things up. Daft things. He lived his entire life as a fantasy in his own head. But, whoever hadn’t said it was right on the money: class does take character. One’s caste or kidney had to be tested, mettle strained and conquered to produce that indefinable jewel: class.

Sitting over a full glass of McGlashan’s Old Filthy, a ‘whisky’ fermented from sweaty socks and pure arsenic, as a direct response to an evil wee letter from the Department of Shirk and Truncheons, showed definite signs of no class and no character. Once again he’d caved in to his old demon and the immediate road ahead was strewn with an alcoholic drenching that could lead to casualty or the grave, but would likely end up in much vomiting and a shivering, fevered, tormented  ‘recovery’ and vows of ‘never again’.

Apparently, he was ‘fit for work’ and would now have to claim Universal Debit in order to survive.

He pondered this decision.

While he did this a spider lurked under the easy-chair he was seated on. An eight-month old female house-spider, she lived on tiny insects and carpet-ticks and was in fact looking after herself a great deal better than Swillings was. In fact, if he but knew it, he could learn a lot from this middle-aged arachnid. The spider was the Tory ideal: self-sufficient and ruthless, she would even feed on her own kind. If she was your pet spider you would have called her ‘Maggie’.

Unaware that he was sitting a mere foot above a deadly killing machine, Swillings continued on his liquid trail of destruction. The television yattered on in the corner: his choice of viewing this early in the morning was stark. ‘Look How Rich I Am’ was on the Property channel and he’d watched until he could take no more. Tweeded fuckers in wellingtons strode around rural Gloucestershire looking for properties viable for selling on at a profit. The world belonged to the well-heeled and daytime TV seemed to want to ram home the point. The alternative seemed to be to view foul-mouthed urban arseholes tear each other apart on ‘The Jeremy Vile Show’. Whatever happened to ‘Watercolour Challenge’ with Hannah Gordon, he wondered.

Times were changing, Tories were winning. Political incorrectness had gone mad. Every action has an opposite but not always equal reaction. Hegelian method: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.    But, it took a while to work itself out. The poor had been shat on since 2010 when this lot took over, yet only now was there ‘outrage’ in the Guardian about obviously disabled folk being found ‘fit for work’ and job centre managers striving to achieve sanction targets. A Malthusian cull had been taking place right under the noses of the well-to-do who, almost to a man and woman, couldn’t give a bugger until forced to ‘care’ by the liberal press.

Ten thousand suicides, they reckoned, due to benefit cuts. That was some amount of anomie. Durkheim would have been most disturbed.

Swillin’s response to all this was apparently to seek oblivion, whether temporary or permanent was a matter he’d left in the lap of some very wasteful and unpredictable gods indeed.

Class, as they say, takes character.