There are words of such beauty. Silly words. Sexy words. Words to make you weep. And then there is "budget". Dour, stodgy, dull as dishwater. An utterly joyless kind of a word. Invoking not so much good times as a plate of slop. It is the no-frills, plain-packaging end of the English language.
At school my young daughter has been working on budgets. Her homework was to fill two columns, sorting want from need. We suggested she apply it to a trip we're planning to Queenstown later in the year. "Well," she said, "I'll need to ride a horse through the snow and afterwards drink hot chocolate with marshmallows and whipped cream."
Most of us are guilty of confusing want with need. It is this inability to separate the two, which is, I think, at the heart of an email I received from Greta last week. Greta has been pondering the increasing wealth gap and was prompted to write by two conversations she'd recently had. "The first was an encounter with a woman I know, a multiple farm-owner, whose husband also works in a senior position. Yet she was lamenting how poor she is at the moment. The second was with a young man I picked up, hitch-hiking. A farm worker, he was trying to get to a Family Court hearing, as he's desperate to have some access to his daughter, to be a good father to her. He told me how when he was growing up he'd never know if he was going to get tea that night. So one has come from poor and is trying hard to make a life and family from the bottom up, and the other is clearly poor in reality and morals, but obviously not in wealth!"
There is nothing quite as odious as hearing the moneyed complain of how hard they have it. If I'm feeling kind I put it down to an unfortunate choice of words.
