Christmas with JAM On It
Jamie Wrench reflects on comfort, guilt and acts of kindness
I’ve always been a bit of a misery guts about Christmas. It’s all so frenetic, so nervously celebratory, so… insincere. And this year, there’s an edge to it. Austerity is biting. Brexit is proving to be a shambles. Firms seem desperate to make a lot of money over Christmas so they can stay in business, and I suspect a lot of them won’t. It’s almost as if things are getting so bad it’s my duty to cast aside my curmudgeonly attitude and get down to some serious celebration. Like bran flakes, it won’t taste nice but it will be good for me.
I suspect part of my annual truculence is that I’m what Theresa May might call a JAC. Not a JAM (Just About Managing). I’m ‘Just About Comfortable’. Of course, when I was young we had it tough. Well, tough-ish… mine was a two-parent family. My parents loved each other, and us. We didn’t have much, but neither did anyone else, so we never got to compare; and we never went short of food or shoes. I was born into the NHS, went through an education system that was free from political controversy or interference and pretty much free at higher education level. I got a job (in London, commuting from Reading) without difficulty, rose without trace through a series of interesting occupations, and when I finally got to retire I’d had a total of ten days of unemployment (taken together in 1973). I had worked hard, scraped by in the early years, done up a few houses as the family grew, saved prudently, spent frugally, lived simply; and now I have a final salary pension and a house in a nice part of the country that is fully paid for (even if it is, as the agent would put it, ‘in need of some redecoration’).
Given that the children are in large measure off my hands, and I don’t have to buy suits any more, I have never been as comfortable as I am now. If a large bill turns up, it’s an inconvenience, not a disaster. I can indulge in the occasional meal out. I’ve countered global warming by investing a lot of my lump sum in solar heating and PV panels that reduce my energy bills and pay me for doing so (the rest of you pay towards it, but that’s not my fault, is it? I didn’t vote for them). As long as I’m careful, I should get by. I’m comfortable, just about…
If I lived in the city things would be different. With one-bedroomed flats in London’s Bloomsbury going for over a million pounds, someone like me has no prospect of repeating my working life today. I’d definitely be a JAM, or a NEMAAR (Not Even Managing At All, Really). And if I hadn’t been so lucky in my upbringing, my ability and my education, I’d be struggling now. So, I’m grateful, but I confess I’m also nervous about losing that comfortableness. I see other people worse off, much worse off, than me: people in crushing debt; young people with no realistic prospects; refugees alone and frightened in a strange and hostile land. I’d like to help them all, I really would. But I’m an addict to being comfortable, and I’m frightened of going cold turkey.
Perhaps there’s a JAC’s Anonymous somewhere. And if there is, I could take comfort from the fact that it would have a ‘twelve-step plan’. I’ve already taken the first step – admitting the problem – so the next one must surely be to look for some small act of kindness to someone at Christmas. We all know Edmund Burke’s ‘all that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good [people] do nothing’. But Sydney Smith said: ‘The greatest mistake is to do nothing because you can only do a little’.
I wish you a comfortable Christmas, for as long as thou canst; and I’ll try to make it a little better for someone else, too.
