Deferred Gratification
blogOnce when I was 16 I had a friend round for dinner. Halfway through the meal he said: I can tell that you’re middle class just from the way you eat.
How so? I asked, a cluster of peas precariously balanced on my fork.
Well, you leave your favourite things till last. Deferred gratification is what makes the middle-class what they are, never living in the moment, always thinking of some future reward.
I looked down at the unbroken yolk on my plate and saw that he might have a point.
My current experiments in living — not checking email until late afternoon and not drinking alcohol in January — are both part of the same imperative: to keep one’s desires under a short leash to avoid the negative by-products of indulging them. One of Tom Hodgkinson’s key tenets is that life is absurd so we should eat, drink, and be merry. This sounds great until you realise that most people’s ideas of enjoyable eating consists of some kind of sugar ‘n’ fat-based stodge.
Talking in the sauna last night to a man who works in salvage, recovering sunken ships. He was talking about a friend of his who, although he had just had a kidney stone removed, was back in the pub the next day. The friend got so drunk that he couldn’t move the next day. The salvage man said this with a mixture of admiration and bemusement.
I asked him why it was that Glasgow drinking culture is so excessive and unremitting. He said it was the madness. I asked whether it was the madness before the drinking starts or the madness that talks hold once you start drinking, but he didn’t seem to know.
This desire for obliteration, this hatred of normal consciousness, I have no idea where it comes from. However, I suspect that the process begins with an inability to defer gratification. Being middle class is the worst thing you can be in some parts of Glasgow and people go to great lengths to avoid anything associated with it.
I mentioned that I had stopped drinking for January and he seemed to understand, even admire my quixotic experiment. He knew someone who had done a similar thing “but ye can on’y drink so many gingers.”