David Charters: The man who uses the same teabag twice is unlikely to be a friend to the orphan

Sep 23 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

THE pompous economist on the wireless was offering his opinion about the financial catastrophe, which threatens to ruin us all.

As he spouted on, I began wondering if more useful employment could be found for him. Were there no floors to be scrubbed, no sacks to be humped?

The kettle wheezed on the stove and I felt grey surging through the roots of my few remaining hairs.

“God’s dye,” as some glowing hymn-hummer had said, piously, some days before, between vigorous sucks on her lozenge – in a doomed attempt to cheer me up, before I accidentally lowered my boot over the ripest bunion on her larger foot.

Outside the kitchen window, a light drizzle was peppering the sullen mood, which had settled across the land.

Suddenly, my wife popped her smiling head around the door. Her lovely turquoise eyes instantly fastened on the old mug, into which I was repeatedly dipping a used teabag.

To be honest, I had hoped that this would not be noticed, a little secret for my eyes only – in rather the same way as the ambitious chief executive prayed that his buck-toothed sister, Gertie, an under-manager in lost property, would never again demonstrate her trick with the pickled onion, the pulley, the surgical stocking and the trumpet.

Its reception at the previous year’s Christmas party had been mixed. Some people, especially those of religious persuasion, had shuddered at her robustly physical humour, which reached its fullest expression when she waggled the trumpet’s mouthpiece perilously close to her bottom.

“Oh, God, no,” the chief executive had whispered to himself, in a rare plea to the Almighty. Others, by contrast, were mopping the tears of mirth from their cheeks.

Anyway, returning swiftly to reality – there I was in the kitchen, gripping the bag between my thumb and index finger, while a sickly liquid dripped from its exhausted perforations.

“In my experience,” said my wife, in tones of near-Biblical disapproval, “the man who uses the same teabag twice is unlikely to be a friend to the orphan.”

“Are you suggesting I’m mean?” I retorted, all puffed with indignation. “Why, there is not a collection box in town, which has not felt a warm chink from one of my groats. And do you remember how, in our courting days, I was always ready with the bus-fare? Birkenhead was our oyster.” This condition had been more accurately, and generously, described as “careful” by my late mother, a Scottish Presbyterian, who, though deeply kind by nature, had little sympathy with those who flaunted their money.

“Shameless floozy,” she would say of the actress, displaying a substantial diamond between the cleavage of her ample, quivering bosoms.

In the wise old days of woolly cardigans, coal scuttles, sensible brogues and biscuit barrels, her ability to scrape 53 sandwiches for the church fete’s country produce stall from a single jar of homemade raspberry jam, had so impressed the tightly-sculpted minister that his Adam’s apple positively jigged with delight.

Of course, in times gone by, there was the concept of “old money”, not tainted by the vulgarity of new money, which demanded to be noticed – in monogrammed tiepins, 4x4 cars, fake coats of arms, a swimming pool in the garden, golf club memberships, private aeroplanes and so on.

For most of us, in these times of economic uncertainty, the merits of old and new money hardly matter at all. The main concern now is “enough money”. That’s the economics of buying what you can afford, rather than what you want.

I was talking along these lines with the two archivists at the office. “A Cox’s orange pippin is worth more than any diamond,” I said, as an opening remark.

“Ah, so you will be zooming down to the barrow to buy some,” replied the elder arch- ivist. Indeed, the barrow is wonderful these days, swollen with the golden fruits of autumn, but I was more taken by his use of the verb “to zoom”.

Was zooming still my arthritic frame’s chosen mode of propulsion, as it had been in boyhood, when our comics were dedicated to saving the letter Z, with all their zooms, zips, zaps, zigs, zits, zags and zzzing (sleeping), in addition to buzz, fuzz and fizz?

Those comics belonged to an age when people, across the classes, tended to be careful with money, or “making ends meet”.

But the silliness of today’s money was represented by Rachel, a publicity manager, whose surname had been shorn in the style of her profession, in much the same way as cocker spaniels once had their tails docked to make them look frisky.

Her email to me, started, “Are you one of millions of concerned mums . . . ?”

LISTEN to David Charters on his podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk