Collage / Cost of living luxury crisis for cap-in-hand bookseller

 

RTomens

Amazon customer services don't ring back...pubs don't answer their phones...try getting a doctor's appointment! Try finding in the supermarket what you could buy once upon a time before Covid 1984! Never mind, we're lucky to be living in the...er...free world...the...er...prosperous West!

Yes, we are free, unless we happen to contravene the latest Correct Thinking and hope to, say, perform somewhere...then...we are cancelled! We are free to say what we like...unless...we say something that upsets someone and it gets recorded as Hate Speech! 

Prosperity being a relative term, I thought as I walked down the road the other day, it seems that each generation has a certain amount of 'luxury' money and that amount grows, always, so perhaps your parents had a Tv in the 60s but that didn't make them particularly well off...and you got a lot more Xmas presents than they did, right? Then time moves on and TV screens grow in size, as does the amount of presents children get...and...one day everyone has a smart phone, even people on the street! There's a surfeit of money. Not enough to buy a boat or even a house, but enough to get a whopping digital TV to be watched from your sofa whilst chomping on takeaways which cost more than if you were to cook for yourself - yes! Cost of Living Crisis! Where? What kind of living are we supposed to be doing when there's no crisis?

Meanwhile, in my bookshop, no-one's buying books because they've all had their gas bills...that or high street bookshops are heaving their last gasp (which they have been since the internet, as you know) and very soon there won't be any...secondhand, that is, because indies selling books that are popular with pink-haired girls are doing well, I hear, especially activist books...and, presumably, fiction which doesn't break any sensitivity rules!

The shop may close in June when the lease is up so I joke with enquiring customers that they'll soon see me on the street, cap in hand. Ha-ha. That isn't funny...or so far from the truth! Happy days!