One of the easiest ways to amuse me is to throw “I know it’s not your kind of music but…..” I can only assume that lots of people listen to stuff that Simon Cowell is making cash from. Here is a song Ruth and I were listening to on the radio in the car yesterday. She was intrigued by the lyrics and their potential. So here I offer you, Emeli Sandé with Next To Me.
This advent has been a time of much soul-searching in our household. Between the two of us we have been looking at what “life is all about”. Between us we have notched up a collective 16 years of university education during our married life and now we have recently [insert artistic license] become adults in a world that has moulded and shaped us into the people that we are. As I come towards the end of a curacy we may for the first time in our adult lives move to a place that we will be able to settle down in and call home. We may be able to leave behind the transient life we have known together since we were 18 years old and find a place that we will live in together for an extended period of time. The 8 dwellings we have lived in during our married life, often for little more than a year at a time will become a thing of the past.
And it is with this in mind that we realise we have become a product of the national educational system of our country of birth, England. We went to university in the late 1990’s when our country’s policy was to teach all of our young people to live in debt. The perceived wisdom from government was that we could all buy ourselves some happiness and economic growth. TV ads were predominantly for credit that was freely available and highly desirable. Those years of university education were predominantly paid for using a variety of state sponsored credit programmes.
This system has been designed to make us all desire more and more things in our lives to make us happy. We still live in a world that tells us we can buy happiness on interest free credit. We have been reevaluation where we stand in all of this….
I spotted this guy outside Covent Garden begging/busking. He’s found a traffic cone and he is playing all of the Christmas Classics on it. He was very good.
Of course this photo doesn’t exist because we don’t have any poor people in the UK.
OK, perhaps not that Christmas Advert…
Over the last two years society has increasingly looked at the state of the nation’s finances on both a macro and a micro level. We are starting to see a relationship between the prosperity of the country and the way in which people treat the money in their pockets. People are examining the causes of our current financial state and finding that people were spending money they didn’t have on things that they perceived that they needed because external pressure was applied to them. The systems increasingly indoctrinated people into using credit to buy trinkets and gadgets to prove their worth to the world around them or the value of their love to another.
I regularly listen to the radio throughout the day whilst I am working and the above advert is played regularly. Its catchy format lends it to audio as well as video by capitalizing on the old song by Terry Scott, “My Bruvva”. Yesterday on the blog I tried to articulate something about the way in which Christmas could still inspire us to change the world. With this in mind it is with sadness that I am confronted with the old world order every twenty minutes throughout the day. Nothing says ‘I love you’ like a child induced guilt trip over an X-Box, 0% finance and crippling debts for… my lovely, lovely mother.
Now that’s the real meaning of Christmas :-/