KEY POINTS:
A newspaper (not this one) rang me up yesterday to ask me what I have to be optimistic about. For the readers, you see, the woman explained. In these difficult times it is important for people to keep their spirits up, and so she was doing a ring
around of prominent people and media types to canvass our opinions.
What joy and succour there is to be found in gems of positivity from hacks and liggers like me I leave to your own estimation, but it was something that gave me pause.
What is keeping me going through the lowering skies of this spring of discontent? What an odd, unsettling sort of inquiry.
Having not yet felt the icy sting of the winds of financial privation, I hadn't thought I needed a new reason to be cheerful. I thought the usual things that bring me joy continue to suffice, like sleep-ins and bunnies and high heels and Marcus Lush.
A public holiday now and then, a bottle of rose, the pleasure of baiting my horrible building manager by using the lift after midnight.
Surely these little pick-me-ups are enough? But no, here was someone asking me earnestly for a shot of sunlight to give her readers heart. It made me nervous. When did things get this bad? Can everyone really be so miserable? What happened? I'm all right Jack, but what the hell is wrong with the rest of you?
Obviously, I know what this is all about. Things have been rather a blur since Fashion Week, but I keep up with the news enough to realise she was calling off the back of the global market meltdown.
The implosion of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac and the coming home to roost of years of greed and avarice by a tranche of reckless and amoral financiers. An Endtimes scenario that kept several of the more excitable business journalists of my acquaintance glued to the telly with ghoulish excitement.
I may be sketchy on the details of this particular apocalypse, but I know enough to know it's big news, and not of the good-times variety. We're stuffed at this end as well because everyone went mad buying property for the last few years .
Those in the know have finally stopped beating around the bush and admitted we're technically, practically, metaphysically, supercalifragilistically in recession, and yet, it still hasn't had any real effect on my life.
I'd rather have a satanic building manager in my rental than have the bottom drop out of the housing market on me any day. The big R hasn't stopped me working, if anything there's more work around, discussing the recession.
It hasn't stopped me buying; the duty of keeping cash circulating in our economy is one I do not shirk, especially not when it's such a good justification for spending more money on things I probably don't need.
It certainly hasn't stopped me partying, but it did make me feel rather out of sync with the rest of the world a few weeks back. Alan Bollard had dropped the official cash rate by a whole point that morning, the US was bailing out its broken market to the tune of billions, and there I was at a fancy do in Northcote to promote new labels on a bottle of fizz.
Sipping champers through a straw in a designer dress, sporting earrings the size of dinner plates, I parroted the same old airy inanities to the same hoary old crop of beautiful people. "Nice shoes." "Thank you." "I got them to match my hair."
There was music and modelling, and a Frenchman who used a sword to slice the top off a magnum of champagne. We ate oysters and hobnobbed, smoked cigarettes and complimented each other on being gorgeous, funny, loved-up, loaded.
We may as well have been Marie Antoinette and her ladies, playing dress-ups in the Petit Trianon. The young and the restless, the bold and the beautiful, the dumb and the dumber, the quick and the dead. Evelyn Waugh would have been, if not proud then at the very least, at ease in our midst. Crisis? What crisis? No crisis here.
I was invited to a F*** the Recession party the other night. I was going to go, but it clashed with something else. Which says it all really. Maybe it's not bad to be part of a generation that stubbornly refuses to take notice of anything but itself.
It's nothing new - the Bright Young Things have been carrying on regardless for centuries, from Marie Antoinette to F. Scott and Zelda. Self-indulgence has always been a safe place to land.
And so it is now. It will take more than the collapse of the entire global economy to distract us from our own brilliance this time round. We'll fashion our glad rags out of actual rags and have our fancy parties under bridges like common trolls. There'll be dogs and cats to barbecue and pass around on sticks and we'll drink and make merry until the meths runs out.
Nero and his boys will have nothing on us. Forget about the fiddle though, we'll play in the End of Days on a twin deck and Serato instead.
