Ghosts of Economies Past

It’s the time of year for retrospective blogs. Everybody is doing a top ten, and I will too soon enough. Sometimes though, life feels like it’s being lived through a retrospective lens. Not the vasolene smeared nostalgic one, the one that once was whole but got dropped, dented and scratched on a day brim full of promise.

I was back at the supermarket café today. It felt like a novelty as I haven’t been out of the house for a while. A group of ten or twelve men were led in by a young woman. There was a tense atmosphere, some of the men seemed to know each other but the  group was subdued. They seemed to be working men, aged 45-55, rough hands, local voices, incongruous amongst the shoppers. The young woman, polished, with a cheap but new suit and beautiful ankles handed around forms, and addressed the group. She ‘explained the process’ then walked away. The men picked up pens awkwardly, scratched heads and compared ideas about what should be written.

It was a gloomy thing. My eyes teared and I left before the end of the show. It seemed to me that this was a group of men made redundant from a factory together, now throwing themselves on the mercy of a supermarket chain that might employ one lucky one in an unskilled job on a quarter of the wages he would have been used to. They were keeping a quiet dignity together in hard times. The young personnel officer had been at pains to point out to them that she had seen others and had more people to see.

It felt a bit like the 1980’s. I used to go to the job centre to pick up a summer job and see men the age of the fathers of my friends (sometimes they WERE the fathers of my friends). Each week they were a little more grey, as though they were fading ghosts having experienced a social death. In that great recession, many of those men never found work again or competed in the job market with the likes of me for jobs in hotel kitchen. The years went on, things picked up, and I forgot them, apart from the time in 2008 I visited a Cornish churchyard and saw the headstones of two that I had known, not factory workers, but miners from Wheel Jane.

The news is trying to put a positive spin on the economy. Let’s hope for the sake of the dads of my children’s friends, and for Nick and me that their optimism comes good.