These are anxiety-inducing days. The pound tanking, interest rates rising, mortgage payments set to increase — and that’s just this week’s bad news. Then there’s the worries we all have that only our nearest and dearest will usually know about. In my case, I wake up every morning unsure if my daughter will go to school or refuse — the uncertainty of what we will wake up to means my wife and I often go to bed stressed and wake up tense.
There are other anxieties: is my forgetfulness a sign of sleep deprivation or is it early onset dementia? Will my mother, who really does have dementia, still remember who I am the next time I visit? How long can I delay turning the heating on? It can sometimes feel that the entry fee to being an adult is to live with a headful of anxieties.
Rewind to September 1992. I am 21 and watching the television news which leads on Britain being forced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Interest rates rose that day — later dubbed Black Wednesday — to 12 per cent. These were just news headlines to me, but for my dad they were a headache because he was responsible for paying the mortgage. At the time Dad was unemployed, having been made redundant from the car factory where he had worked, and money was in short supply. I have kept a diary since I was 10 and leafing through its entries they are filled with anxiety, mostly about my family’s lack of money. Naturally, it is all anxiety of the “woe is me” variety — moans about all my clothes coming from jumble sales, gripes about how I didn’t get any birthday presents.
I read them now and I wonder how it felt for my parents, trying to raise four children on what my dad made working on a factory production line. The domestic anxieties of childhood were accompanied by larger worries, not least the fear of being wiped out by a nuclear war.
Fast-forward to today and those same worries have resurfaced but this time I am the father fretting about mortgage payments and negative equity. In my childhood memories my late father is always angry, impatient and easily inflamed. I found it exhausting being his son but watching the news these last few weeks, aware of how my mood has darkened, I now wonder whether my father was not suffering from anxiety from the pressure to support his family.
I can’t wish the bad news away, so what to do? My wife finds that a glass or two of wine at the end of the day takes the edge off. I don’t drink so my distractions tend to be music, walks and laughter. I have episodes of Frasier downloaded on my phone and when I feel overwhelmed I retreat to mid-Nineties Seattle.
The most important lesson I have learnt from living through past ages of anxiety is the knowledge that however bad these times might seem, they are endurable. If my father could keep going, with more mouths to feed and without a job, then so can his more fortunate son.
In other news...
Labour MP Rupa Huq has apologised to Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng for calling him only “superficially black.” The comment, made during a fringe event at the Labour conference, earned her a rebuke from Sir Keir Starmer, who called it racist and suspended the Labour whip.
There are many things one can legitimately call the Chancellor but to imply that because he is well-spoken that makes him less black is lazy and downright offensive.
The truth is that there is not only one way to be black, Asian or anything else —just as the Left have no right to assume every person of colour will share their politics. If Huq wanted to hit Kwarteng where it hurts it would have been smarter to refer to him as “superficially competent.”
