Skeleton-Faced Hedonists
A telling comparison: Laura has gone to New York for a week in order to speak at an exhibition about Seduction, whereas I am in Glasgow writing emails to local politicians. I think it is clear who has the better deal. For Valentine’s we had a game of scrabble whilst listening to Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, which is being repeated on Radio 7. My favourite, possibly because I identify with her, is the one with Patricia Routledge, about a busybody who is always writing letters.
My current email is about the continuing degradation of the local area by the skeleton-faced hedonists who congregate around the Salvation Army hostel. Now, I have nothing against teetotal Christian organisations who take in drug addicts when they are released from prison, but I do wish that their modus operandi included cleaning up after their charges. Every morning I see the cleaner washing down the pavement outside the hostel, but he never bothers with the pavement on the other side of Clyde Street. Nor is any effort made to clean the patch of land between the river and street, which is a mess of empty cider and wine bottles. Every evening I see the scrawny, skeleton-faced hedonists chatting gaily, half-cut, and anticipating the oblivion ahead.
In The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Oscar Wilde suggests that the real enemy of reform are the virtuous working classes, those who accept their sorry lot and work hard in degrading jobs. The working class who steal and debauch are heroically spurning the current inequitable system. Wilde proposes that all property be held in common, that no man should accumulate more materials and wealth than he actually needs, and that we should get criminals and machines to do menial work so that everyone else can dedicate themselves to creating and appreciating works of beauty. Every time I walk past the Salvation Army hostel I think about these ideas, I wonder whether the skeleton-faced underclass of Glasgow could be saved by political reform or would they just squander their new found riches on even more dispiriting pleasures?