Facing up to post-Budget reality of life in the slow lane

Workers who still have jobs are gracefully accepting pay cuts and looking at ways of saving money

CAUSE FOR celebration this week, or so it seemed at first. A close friend was given a big promotion out of the blue. She was summoned to the boss’s office, told the good news and next thing the announcement was up on the company notice board – before she had quite made up her mind or inquired about a pay rise. It turned out there was no pay rise. In fact just a week earlier she had agreed to a substantial pay cut which she’d balanced by reducing her children’s creche days from five to three, parking them with a relative instead. This was what you might call a status promotion. Prestige galore. Zero perks.

She’s fine with that. Just as workers everywhere in the private sector are bowing gracefully, even gratefully to pay cuts, taking the levies and tax hikes on the chin, many are also willing to do much more for less, while at the same time operating under a cloud of anxiety over what comes next. They’re also getting stressed out trying to look busy and useful. Working through a downturn is expensive. You can save money by bringing sandwiches to work and saying no to lattes, but these days there are endless collections for colleagues who are leaving and that’s no time to be tight. Card shops must be doing a bomb in those big “you’re leaving!” cards. The only trouble is, with staff numbers shrinking, they don’t have to be quite so big.

Still, I remind myself that we’re lucky to have jobs, even as my husband unwraps his latest purchase from Argos, a hair clippers he thinks will be a great saving on visits to the barber at €20 a pop. He says it will pay for itself in a matter of weeks and save him hours of valuable time, previously spent sitting in the queue on Saturdays, reading leftover sections of the Star.

My guess is that after the first brutal, tufty haircut it will be quietly retired to the top of the kitchen cupboard beside the DIY ham slicer purchased in the same spirit from Lidl. A great idea – why buy all that expensive, plastic ham for the school lunches when we could be boiling up our own at weekends, except that, big and ugly as it is, the slicer doesn’t actually accommodate a whole ham and has only two settings – shavings or slab.

Space is getting tight up there in the gadget graveyard, what with the three-tier vegetable steamer that was to have transformed the family into svelte, energised people through daily doses of vegetables with the vitamins locked in rather than washed away; the Brita water filter jug that briefly replaced bottled water back in the days when we were actually buying bottled water and the 17-part smoothie maker acquired in anticipation of dawn visits to Smithfield to buy industrial quantities of fruit and enjoy light banter with salt of the earth traders.

In previous times, the lot might have been boxed up and sent to the parish fete, but now I’m wondering if in some not so far-off future, we might actually find some use for these items. Could they perhaps be bartered in a new local economy that might spring up when cash gets really tight? I’ll swap you a set of Paul Costelloe steak knives for some of your home-reared pig kind of thing? Or give me a dozen fresh eggs for the cocktail ice-crusher?

Laugh if you will, but in England there are towns and villages printing up their own currency and coffee mornings have given way to swapping parties. I can see the boom-time mania for decluttering and paring everything back to clean, minimalist lines giving way to a “let’s hold on to that, you never know when it might come in handy” kind of thinking.

Meanwhile, I hear that people have started to lick up to air hostesses again, establishing a line to duty-free fags and booze. And little economies are getting even thriftier: an estate agent friend tells me he’s cut out the central heating at home, fuelling a stove with off-cuts from a local timber yard, while a friend of his who sells cars has given up his premises and instead uses the almost empty cul-de-sac where he lives as a forecourt instead.

Lucky and all as we are, we’ve yet to work out exactly what the Budget means for us. Reckon on losing a month’s salary a year is what one economist said, or as a friend put it: “That’s my walking around money gone.”

Still, we are ready for life in the slow lane. Brian Cowen warned us we will all be taking a step back in time in terms of lifestyle, maybe as far back as when we first married and had a kitchen made from stacked up bricks and planks of wood in which even at that stage there were items destined never to be used, like the Habitat chicken brick. Back then, the house speciality was chilli for a crowd (and heartburn for a week). I must look out for the recipe.