Earlier this week I met Christine Hancock of the campaigning public health charity Oxford Health Alliance and we got to discussing the state of the economy, as one does these days. Her comment about the lack of realism in do-gooding middle class advice about saving money by shopping for healthy food reminded me of this passage from Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier:
The miner’s family spend only tenpence a week on green vegetables and
tenpence half-penny on milk (remember that one of them is a child less
than three years old), and nothing on fruit; but they spend one and
nine on sugar (about eight pounds of sugar, that is) and a shilling on
tea. The half-crown spent on meat might represent a small joint and the
materials for a stew; probably as often as not it would represent four
or five tins of bully beef. The basis of their diet, therefore, is
white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes—an
appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on
wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like
the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate
their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary
human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being
would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the
peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined
you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy
breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man
doesn’t. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last
chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when
you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat
dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is
always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three
pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the
kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind
works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and
sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at
least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold
water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly
palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man’s opium. A cup of
tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a
crust of brown bread.
(The whole section is on the Orwell Prize website.)
My conversation with Christine was followed by an article in the FT today about soaring fast food sales as diners switch from The Ivy to KFC….
Scary how relevant Orwell is turning out to be. He's always been one of my favourite writers, not for political reasons per se but because of his marvellous and again highly relevant essay on Politics and the English Language. An excellent recent biography of Orwell was written by an old friend of mine, DJ Taylor – there is a taster here.
Agree how good Orwell's piece is – and how amazingly contemporary it feels. I've recently been using his six 'rules' in my communications training courses for economists:
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.
How can I recruit a Patron for a mental health charity?
You just got me convinced to take a closer look on that paper, I've heard before about Politics and the English Language but I didn't have an active interest until now. I realized that I still have a lot of practice to do on ielts speaking in order to reach perfect communication. Thank you for sharing these rules, I find them important.