Millionaires, money, inheritance and entitlement

I’m on FIRE with the blogging this month! Quantity rather than quality, perhaps, but anything’s better than nowt. I would like to point out not all my opinion pieces will be having a pop at things I read in the Guardian, honest.  It’s just whenever I find a Facebook share comment extending into the third paragraph, I’m trying to remember that if I’ve got that much to say, this is probably a better place for it.  Thus Facebook can remain the happy realm of holiday snaps, George Takei and Buzzfeeds that we all know and WISH we could stop looking at. Enjoy! 

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This morning saw the publication of one of the most bizarre articles I’ve seen in the Graun for some time.  The paper reports, with apparent disapproval, that several millionaires do not plan on leaving any of their money to their children.  The miserly magnates include John Roberts (of whom I’ve never heard, but who judging from the image accompanying the article, can’t make toast worth a damn); musical maestro and Gollum-a-like Andrew Lloyd-Webber; telly chef Nigella Lawson; and martial arts movie star Jackie Chan.

For something in a left-leaning paper, the article’s response to this is frankly weird.  Erica Buis, while acknowledging that the children of a millionaire are hardly to be pitied, nonetheless takes their part against their parsimonious parent:

is this really the economic climate in which to be sending your kids out into the cold, then blaming them if they freeze? … would it be wrong for Roberts to give them half a deposit on a small flat? Something that levels the playing field between them and the younger version of him, now that the average deposit required for a mortgage is 10 times higher than it was around 20 years ago?

This seems to me to miss the point completely, which is why these individuals should be in possession of such staggering wealth to hand round or not as they please in the first place.  Never mind ‘levelling the playing field’ between these oofy elders and their cash-strapped kids.  What about ‘levelling the playing field’ between the children of the rich and the rest of the world?  These people will already have had access to the best of opportunities to set themselves up for a prosperous future – private education, additional tuition, secure and safe living environment, a network of powerful family friends, and that most precious of commodities, time.  I very much doubt that Nigella’s brood have spent their evenings and weekends manning the tills in Tesco, or getting up at 5AM to do a paper-round before school in order to be able to afford trainers, or music lessons, or food.

Whether their parents leave them an additional wodge of cash when they shuffle off the perch is neither here nor there – by the time that happens, the children of the rich have already reaped the benefits of birth.  Rich children and the adults they grow into by and large do better academically, physically, professionally, and socially, and this is a product of the environment they grew up in and the opportunities that gave them, not a status magically conferred upon the death of their parents and the inheritance of their wealth.  I don’t blame these people, or their parents, for taking advantage of these opportunities – but the fact they are only available to an elite minority is a big problem.  If equality is Buis’ concern, rather than mere acquisitiveness, she should be questioning the validity not of selfishness, but of limitless personal wealth itself.  The aim should not be to quibble about how a particular rich man disposes his estate, but to tax that estate proportionately throughout life, so that no one individual ends up with the power to bestow the gross national product of a small country, whether it be upon a child or a chihuahua.

Quite aside from this larger point, I think people who ‘expect’ inheritance are odious.  If parents want to give gifts or help out, that’s very lovely, but what on earth makes people think that they’re entitled?  There has been much wittering in the press over the last 10 years about the ‘SKI’ set – baby boomers gleefully “Spending the Kids’ Inheritance.”  But why should money be piled up for an uncertain future, rather than spent making the most out of the one life these ‘selfish’ parents are ever going to have?  Moreover, for most people, it’s not so much a question of ‘spending the inheritance’ as ‘making ends meet’: the idea that their grown-up children are ‘counting on’ an inheritance can blight the lives of less well-off parents, who work too hard and live too meagrely out of a sense of obligation to ‘leave something for the kids’.  On the other side of the coin, inheritance is often used as a weapon – some parents seem to enjoy the power it gives, rewarding this child and punishing that one from beyond the grave, safe from the emotional fall-out.  The anger, hurt and resentment this causes can tear apart the family left behind, when they ought to be supporting one another through their grief.

As my wonderful Nan was wont to say, ‘there’s no pockets in a shroud’.  She gave gifts while she was still around to see them enjoyed, died leaving little but the memory of her kindness and good sense – an inheritance which all her children, and grandchildren, can cherish.

My visit to the Ginstitute

This Wednesday, I finally cashed in a voucher I had been bought for my birthday all the way back in November.  The voucher was so beautiful that it constituted a present in itself for a stationary fiend like me, a rectangle of creamy card embossed with copper calligraphy:

But what it entitled me to was even better – the chance to make my very own gin, under the expert supervision of gin-master Jake Burger at the Ginstitute, home of Portobello Road London Dry Gin!

I am an enormous fan of gin.  Although I’m generally speaking a beer drinker, a good G&T is my go-to drink whenever I’m trying to shift my beer belly, or if by evil chance I find myself in the sort of establishment that considers Stella Artois to be the last word in brewed beverages.  As with everything I like, I enjoy the opportunity to find out more about it. I also liked the do-it-yourself aspect of the gift.  I have made my own fruit wine before, and assisted in the creation of several batches of real ale of varying degrees of drinkability.  But with the best will in the world, I think I’d have a hard time setting up my own distillery in the kitchen cupboard.  The Ginstitute offered the opportunity to muck about making spirits without any commitment.

I got to Notting Hill Gate early, so had a pleasant amble down the Portobello Road, enjoying being there on a mild weekday afternoon when it was actually possible to stroll instead of swim through the packed throngs.  The Portobello Star (which houses the Ginstitute) is a small but perfectly formed bar room, all dark wood and green-and-gold wallpaper, and as I waited there I leafed through their menu, featuring bar snacks created in partnership with the sublime Ginger Pig butchers, and a dizzying array of imaginatively-named cocktails.

My fellow Ginstituters were also waiting – a couple from York who had been given the vouchers as a gift by their son, and another couple who had more or less wandered in off the street, intrigued by the advertisement outside the pub.  Presently, we were ushered upstairs into ‘the smallest museum in London’, and into the presence of Jake, who was in the process of constructing a round of perfect Tom Collins cocktails.  Whilst we dispatched these with indecent haste, he brought us up to speed on the dim, dirty and sometimes downright depressing history of gin in England.

Gin first appears in the early 16^th century (or possibly some time before, depending on who you’re listening to and how you classify something as ‘gin’) when the Dutch are recorded as guzzling down genever.  When English soldiers fought alongside them against the Spanish in 1585, they enthusiastically acquired the habit, imbibing freely before going into battle (possibly the origin of the expression ‘Dutch courage’).  It didn’t take long for them to bring the tipple back with them to Blighty, and gin, being very strong and extremely cheap, quickly became so wildly popular with the ‘lower orders’ that it threatened the very social and economic fabric of the country.  William Hogarth’s famous etchings, Beer Street and Gin Lane, demonstrated what he and many others saw to be the deleterious effects of the gin craze on the working classes, who had formerly thrived on a diet of weak ale.

Although manifestly suffering from a brutal cold, Jake still brought the history of gin on both sides of the Atlantic to vivid life, with his enthusiasm and his store of fascinating facts.  It helped that the museum was so atmospheric, full of gin-erobilia – glass cabinets filled with dusty bottles of long-defunct brands, the business card of one of the greatest American cocktail mixers, and a number of ornate, hand-etched mirrors in the lavish style of the 18^th century’s ‘gin palaces’, which still informs the ambience of many a traditional English pub today.

 Leaving behind the bad old days of gut-rot adulterated with turps and sulphuric acid, Jake brought us bang up to date with the invention of the column still, the regulation of the distillation industry, the rise (and occasional fall) of the big hitters of mass-produced gin, and the current renaissance of artisanal gin makers proliferating in London today.  It quickly becomes clear from all the fond name-dropping that the gin world is a small and cordial one – the Portobello Road team are as friendly with the managers of Beefeater and Bombay Sapphire as they are with small-scale operators who might be seen as their direct competitors, such as the team of toffs behind the Sipsmiths range.

The history lesson was over too soon, and it was back to the business in hand.  Armed with notepad, pencil and a bracing G&T (with the Portobello Star’s distinctive twist of grapefruit rather than lemon or lime) we trooped up to the still room – a magnificent mad-scientist-meets-art-deco laboratory full of test-tubes and great glass demijohns of alcohol – to get hands-on creating our own gin.

Jake set out the parameters of our project.  London dry gin is legally a grain-based spirit of at least 37.5% ABV in which the flavour of juniper predominates (and does not, contrary to what you might expect, have to be made in London).  Beyond these basic stipulations, the world was our oyster – although he did also point out that in order to produce something drinkable, it was important to maintain a balance between the juniper base, the zesty, fruity top notes, more ephemeral flavours and the lingering spice tones.  He pointed out that with so many botanicals to choose from this did not significantly limit a gin-blender’s scope – he had recently had someone come in determined to achieve a curry gin, and was able to send them away with a bottle of something that satisfied this peculiar desire and could still be said to answer to the name of gin.

To give us an idea of the possibilities, Jake passed around a number of raw aromatics, including juniper berries, coriander seed, and orris and licorice roots, encouraging us to crush, smell and taste.  The juniper yielded the Christmassy aroma and sweaty undertone familiar to anyone who’s ever stuck their beak into a G&T.  Jake told us that it grows wild on the mountainsides of Tuscany, and is hand-harvested, the berries beaten from the prickly bushes into buckets using a special stick known as a spank-berry.

When I was able to control my mirth at this (I think perhaps that third cocktail was not such a great idea) he continued to introduce us to the somewhat daunting array of distillations at our disposal, ranging from familiar kitchen staples like cinnamon and orange peel to the rather more exotic (wormwood), the unexpected (English hops??) and the (to me) downright essential (Yorkshire Tea?  Yes please).  We were given some time to scribble down the flavours that had most appealed to us, advised by Jake if we had gone too far off-piste, and finally – the science bit! – were allowed to start mixing up our gins.

I had decided to create a plain and hearty English gin, evoking the cosy, comfortable pleasures I subscribe to.  So in addition to Jake’s recommended minimum mixture of juniper, coriander, angelica and orris root, I added English hops, a healthy slug of Yorkshire tea, an extra helping of the biscuit-y orris, some cassia (described by Jake as tasting ‘like cinnamon but more so’) and a little lemon verbena and some grapefruit for a lift.  I wish I could pretend this was the result of a judicious decision-making process, but frankly I was just overexcited, and had to be politely restrained from adding elderberry, dandelion and burdock, and licorice root as well.

The result was deemed a success by Jake, my Ginstitute colleagues, and most importantly by me, and was lovingly christened “Spankberry Tea & Biscuits”.  Offered the choice of having the label applied dead flush or drunkenly askew, I’m sure you can guess what I opted for.  If you fancy putting your tastebuds in my hands, you can nip along to the Ginstitute’s website and order a bottle of my gin – just enter number C191403.   However, I can just as confidently recommend the Portobello Road’s own Number 171.  I was also provided with a bottle of this as part of the day’s haul, and can therefore testify to its deliciousness in cocktails, mixed with tonic or slurped surreptitiously from the bottle on a station platform.

We finished off the afternoon with a round of martinis back in the museum, then stumbled off into the sunlit streets, a bottle of gin under each arm and dipsomaniac smiles on our faces.  An absolutely corking present for anyone you know who’s fond of gin!

Use your words

I am – to put it kindly – an opinionated person.  Less kindly, but perhaps more accurately, I am a mouthy cow.  I always have been.  This is the result of being raised by highly articulate, argumentative people who frankly didn’t have the patience to treat me like a child, even when I was one.  While I would rarely be fobbed off with a simple and unequivocal “Because I SAY SO!”, if my parents took the trouble to argue with me, then they were playing to win.  I wasn’t going to get my own way (or even the time of day) unless I was able to put forward a compelling argument.

And then there was the question of my cultural consumption. I refused to learn to read at all until I was five years old.  My resolve was finally cunningly undermined by my grandmother.  On my fifth birthday, she displayed a pair of beautifully illustrated hard-back books she had bought me (The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, if you’re asking) and then ostentatiously handed them to my father for safe keeping, saying what a shame it was they were no use to me yet, but that he could look after them for me until I had learnt to read them myself.  I got those books within the month.  I read them; then I read everything else.  My tastes were catholic: I read the standard children’s fare – comics, Judy annuals, and the inevitable Enid Blyton (resulting in a lifelong preoccupation with pork pies and ginger beer) – but also anything else I could lay my hands on: Catherine Cooksons at my nan’s, my father’s eclectic mix of Tolkien and Tolstoy, Dune and Louis L’Amour, and anything and everything in my mother’s glass-fronted book cabinet – a treasure trove of Terry Pratchett and Thomas Hardy alongside heavy tomes on genetics, astrology and zen, not to mention crack-spined copies of Lolita and the Kama Sutra, guiltily inhaled while standing by the shelf, one ear turned towards the living room door.

I loved to read, because I loved words.  Because words gave you power. They allowed you to put ideas in people’s heads.  And they allowed you to make people see you – really see the real you, whether they liked it or not.  Without them, I could only be what other people chose to see.  But by using my words, I could force them to see the parts of me I was proud of – that I was clever; that I could be funny; that I had all the same hormone-driven desires as my prettier peers, that no-one wanted to recognise could be roiling beneath my dumpy teenage surface.

Most importantly of all, words gave you the power to say what you wanted, explain why you wanted it, and prove that you deserved it.  They allowed me to take the mass of unmet wants and inchoate passions sloshing formlessly around in me, and shape them into something I could work with.  They gave me tools to track down the elusive truth of an argument, an idea, a person, to whittle and refine my concept of that truth until I was as close to it as it was possible to get.  And that proximity to what was real was an exhilirating drug I found I couldn’t do without.

The practical upshot of all this is that I am an INTENSELY verbal person.  I honestly don’t ever have a feeling that I can’t articulate – in fact, for me, the feeling barely exists until it is articulated.  I feel compelled to talk about things that are difficult or painful, or that I just don’t understand, as it is only by reasoning my way through them with words that any kind of resolution is achieved.  An unexplored emotion will nag at me like a sore tooth, and I just cannot keep from prodding.  I’m lucky I was born when I was, not a few hundred years ago, or I’d barely have been out of the scold’s bridle or off the ducking stool I fear.  Simply put, the worst thing anyone can do to me is present me with a problem and then say “I don’t want to talk about it.”

However.  There are people I encounter with whom this characteristic is a problem.  What works for me does not necessarily work for them, and my need for clarity and conclusion can on occasion actually inhibit them.  Some feel intimidated by the demand that they verbalise their thoughts and feelings on sensitive or complicated subjects even to themselves, never mind a third party.  Others are intuitive, instinctive people, for whom it is enough to simply feel a thing without having to define what it is and why.  I have had to learn to know when to stop with these people, because what to me is an exchange of views, feels to them like an argument; what from my perspective is an investigation of who they are and how they feel, to them is an intrusive interrogation.

Because my power lies so completely in my words, power over me resides in silence – not just those who can force me to be silent (mercifully few since leaving school), but those who have mastered silence themselves, who refuse to be drawn at all onto my home turf.  It is a method of control that seems to go much deeper than mine, than grappling the world to the ground with words.  Satyagraha means “insistence on the truth”, but is exemplified by passive resistance – it is what I always think of when I encounter one of these people, who are capable of sitting with a feeling or a fact without needing to understand or argue with it, to challenge or to change it.  I envy those who hold this alien power, frustrated by their power over me – for if they won’t give me their words, I cannot share or shape them, must stand struck dumb before them, seeing only what they choose to let me see.

When ‘could be worse’ isn’t good enough – a response to Laura Kay’s ‘4 Great Things About Renting’

Laura Kay, who describes herself in her Guardian profile as a ‘free-lance writer and part-time sandwich maker’, has written a comment piece for the Graun exhorting ‘Generation Rent’ (the growing numbers of people in their twenties and thirties who can expect to be renting privately for the foreseeable future) to buck up – renting is actually a great lark, and we should be sanguine about skyrocketing house prices and static salaries.

I find this article extraordinarily irritating.  Which is a bit unfair, as it’s only her opinion.  It probably doesn’t help that I’ve been saving about a third of my income for a mortgage deposit for the last year and a half, and keep thinking about how many pairs of boots I could have by now if I hadn’t been!  But mainly it’s the senseless optimism and lack of logic that nabs my nannygoat.

Quite apart from apparently having the political consciousness of a dishcloth, Pollyanna here seems to have forgotten a few very important caveats to her ‘4 great things’:

1) Not living in fear of breakages:  I actually live more in fear of breakages as a renter than I would if I owned the place.  If the boiler breaks in my flat, I have to

(a) get in touch with my landlords, who are a bugger to get hold of as frequently out of the country;
(b) get their permission to get the problem solved, deal with their angst about how much it’s going to cost, potentially have to put up with them trying to get it done on the cheap by some dodgy geezer with no qualifications before they eventually admit defeat and let me get a professional in;
(c) go through the whole process again if the first intervention doesn’t work, although this time with the angst amplified, and with passive aggressive noises being made about how much expense/hassle is involved in renting the flat to us and ‘maybe we should just sell it’, leading me to be incredibly anxious and inexplicably guilty every time several things need sorting in quick succession.

If I actually owned the flat, and thus the boiler therein, I could simply get the damn thing fixed or, if I couldn’t afford it, live with it.  I wouldn’t spend my life in a state of anxious powerlessness.

2) Freedom to move:  Only if you have a massive deposit sitting handy, or someone rich to sub you.  Most landlords won’t give you back your deposit until weeks after you vacate the property; paradoxically, new landlord won’t let you move in until they have the deposit.  So unless you have a few grand going spare, upping sticks is not exactly the carefree process the author implies.

3) Housemates: I’ve had some bad ones.  I’ve had some great ones.  But ultimately, I’m nearly 30; I’ve been in a relationship for over 5 years; I know who I want to live with.  My parents had bought a house and had two children (and, fair dos, a divorce) by my age, whereas I am still living like a student.  It’s not such a ‘great experience’ any more.

4) Not a symptom of a ‘lost generation’: Ah, this is the one that really had the cerebral fluid boiling out my ears.

“We may be a generation struggling to find jobs and affordable housing, but we’re also a generation who can talk about it, laugh about it and get on with it. There are worse things to be known for than not owning four walls: at least we’re not Generation Plague.”

I detect a strong aroma of the Four Yorkshiremen here – “oh, but we were happy in those days, though we were poor!” “BECAUSE we were poor!” – along with a sewage-y underwhiff of Tory pull-your-socks-up-never-had-it-so-good-ism that makes the gorge rise in my throat.  It could be worse, so stop complaining?  I’ll accept that as a socioeconomic argument when you can spit into my open coffin, thank you very much.

Yes, there is nothing intrinsically awful about renting; indeed, in many other countries it is the norm and people are perfectly happy to do it.  But those countries have social housing, rent control, tenancy rights, and a living wage, as well as a reasonable expectation that when you’re old, state provision isn’t going to be so paltry you will have to make a choice between eating and heating.  In Britain, unless you get very lucky with your landlord, to be a renter is to be a second class citizen, with very little of the ‘freedom’ Kay extols – not even the freedom to paint the walls or keep a cat – and no security at all.