Motherload

In the brilliant, provocative, honest  Nickel and Dimed , Barbara Ehrenreich takes a deep dive into the world of low-paid work in America. The story she has to tell is in some ways predictable. She can't make ends meet on the kind of money the lowest-paid make. No shit, Sherlock. What saves her account from turning those low-paid people into victims, and turns them instead into the  victimised  — people thrown under the wheels of a systemic problem: Capitalism — is that she never tries to hide the fact that she is privileged, well-educated and cushioned. Her honesty in admitting and claiming this (she makes no bones about the fact that she would never willingly choose to take a low-paid job) means that her work exists in a realistic framework. She is in no sense romanticising the 'poor who are always with us'. And she is not justifying herself.  No one can accuse you of what you claim as your own. How I love that her name means 'rich in honour'...

I was watching teenage boys the other day. Don't worry, I'm no cougar, although I was abstractly looking at their just-formed musculature, their flicky hair, their sulky pouts, and thinking how beautiful they were, these young animals, as they hopped and flew on their skateboards. Our seven-year-old boy was trying to keep up with them on his trick scooter — half their height, without the fuzzy facial hair on his upper lip, and with upper arm muscles that look like tiny chicken dippers. He tried to zoom up the board they had leant against a block in the skatepark, and didn't have the oomph to leap over its lip, so kept sliding back down, bringing the board with him. They stood in a row, a frieze of beautiful youth silhouetted against the setting Spring afternoon sun, calling to him not to bother, to stop trying. Boy picked up his scooter and carried it off the piste, through the grass to sit behind a nearby tree. I sauntered casually over, to find him moodily staring i...