Stop moaning.

No.

You stop moaning.

Etc.

Barbara McCarthy (above) writes:

We’ve all been there – stuck listening to someone’s problems, repetitively, while thinking. ‘You have it so easy. If that was all that was wrong in my life, I’d be laughing the head of myself.’ The people who are having a fantastic time of it are few and far between at the moment, so the rest of us are so consumed by our daily financial struggles and day in day out woes, we just cant hold them in any more and will use any opportunity to tell people how bad we have it.

Pub talk has gone from ‘My wonderful wife (who’s just underwent a €20,000 butt lift and bingo wing removal procedure) and I are just ruminating on our next property move, we were thinking Provence or Estonia…’ to ‘We’re so broke, we can’t put petrol in the car, our 8 mortgages haven’t been paid in six months, the credit card was declined in a German grocery store.’

The next person will then interject; ‘Well my phone’s been cut off, my husband is up in court for tax evasion next week, the car which was on the way to being repossessed broke down because I forgot to put petrol in it, we’ve eaten nothing but porridge for the last six months.’ After that it sounds like a clip from Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen. ‘You think that’s bad, we’re living in a rolled up newspaper in a septic tank and sitting round a wish bone for the last year with nothing else to eat.’

Our predicaments are terrible without doubt and I’m not discrediting anyone’s problems, but because we’re all screwed, we’ve become completely self obsessed and can’t think any further than ourselves.

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