‘The old world is dying, the new is long-overdue; in this dark interval, monsters are spawned.’ Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (c. 1930)

‘Howdy hoody! Lemme guess: you was just passing through the middle of middle England, and you recognized the flame-decorated Ferrari outside my Hobbit Hole, and you buzzed ‘cos you fancied a parley? That’s dandy, Olly – it was Twisty weren’t it? – come into my parlour; my front door may be triple-lock and alarmed, but it’s always open to slumming tenants like you – and most of them are like you these days – young-old looking, well-spoken, badly-dressed – the declining-flailing newly-minted middle class. You’re in one of my Luton loft perversions aren’t you? That’s cool, especially in winter (Boom! Boom!) – I skimped on the insulation didn’t I…

‘It’s no aggro, honest – being a rentier in retirement, I’ve got loadsa time – it’s money, as you know to your Costa – you’re a zero-hours barista aren’t you, after college hours? I’ve seen you grinding away in the shitty centre. With that kind of work-study-life imbalance, no wonder you look narkered and fazzled. Make yourself uncomfortable on the Le Cor-upsidaisy harm chair, while I chillax on the chaise – sit down before your half-arsed jeans fall down.

‘So, what’s with the back-to-the-80s-future look, Beastie Boy? Say what? You’ll have to speak up – I’m getting mutton. “It’s drippy”? I’ll grant you that, but ain’t it also a bit stale for a twenty-first-century fresher? Still, I can’t nit-pick, dressed to the Nigels in these fifties cuntry casuals, and with my Ozzy-Ozborne mop. Looks like we’re both stuck in the muddy past lane.

‘Matter of factually, it’s t’riffic you social called; talk is so much better than texting. In response to my recent… communication you’d have tapped “SRYCPU sobbing emoji” on that infernal machine that’s super-glued to your hand, and I’d have struck back – “FULSRPM!!!!!”. Where would that have got you? In arsehole street, before you could have sent me a pleading-face icon … So let’s chin-wag awhile, and leave the nitty-shitty for laters…

‘What you studying at Bedfordshire Adversity then, stale-man? I never made the undergrad, or even the High-school grade, but I’ve filleted a shelf load of books – remember them clunky things? – and I’ve graduated from life’s university with dishonours… so I’m switched on to most subjects…’

‘Whatdyasay? “Socio-Medial Studies”? Waste of wonga son – you can’t beat Hal at his own video game. In this age of artificial stupidity, your best bet would be studying something arty or anthro. Your old man should’ve encouraged you to think outside the google-box. It’s pointless opting for a common-nonsensical plan A, like he did, when he went in for what – accountancy? banking? quite right too, during Thatcher’s financialising free-for-all; now’s the time to go counter-intuitive insurgent. By the wayside, where do your folks live? The Costwolds? Classy. Wouldn’t you – won’t you – be more comfortable living under the stairs there, prodigal brat, than camping out chez yours truly grabby, and paying through hard barista labour for the displeasure? What’s that? What about your “manhood” and “independence”? Sold and bought sunshine, before you was spawned…

‘Mind if I “strum and stroke”? Cool your boots, this ain’t Property Sex – I don’t have enough lead in my pencil these days, worst luck; “smoke” I mean. Oh yeah? Well, I don’t mind if you do mind. This is my castle and I’ll do what I want in it – England’s a free-enterprise zone, where property wrongs are absolute. And, no, I ain’t opening the window – my arthritic pains would go up to eleven in the cold – you’ll just have to suck the fumes up, it’s tough luck – boomers before zoomers – the golden-oldie rule.

‘Still, you are in luck in one respect – you’ve caught me in a nostal-truistic-pisspodical-melancholeric mood. So, before we get on down to monkey business, I’m gonna give you a free lecture from university of hard living, featuring snippets of my outlaw autobio, and an old-mansplanation as to why son-of-a-parvenu you currently finds himself squirming in a torture chair opposite Bob the ex-builder me. Curious about any of the above? Yes, yo, dunno? That smart-arse phone has boiled your brain and tied up your tongue lad – pocket it, and get a real life; I did – here it is:

‘Born in the late-fifties NHS, comprehensively uneducated in the sixties, my psycho-delic dad did a bunk in ‘68. At the fag end of the stoned age – circa ‘75 – I was a Cat-Stevens send-up – all big hair and beaver – skivvying on a building site for an England that had won the war (with a ‘little’ help from others) but lost its blood-stained colonial spoils. Oil inflation poured fuel on the bonfire of our imperial vanities. On my degraded wages, I had no choice but to live with me old mum, in a one-bed council flat overlooking the Barnet bypass. My minimal free time was as same-old-same-old as my 6-to-5. All we had back then was the local pube and the hire-purchase idiot box, which poured American day dreams into our head – fast-car ads, glam rock, gangster films. On Saturdays I buried myself in the warm public library, where I got into punk philosophy – Krackpotkin, Freddy Nihilisty – who taught me that anarchy’s the only way to be a dancing star. You smile like philosophy’s so 1900s kid, but if you don’t invent one, you’ll be imprisoned in someone else’s – thus spake Billy Blake. What’s your generation’s credo? “Can’t get rich, slow or quick, but we’ll still die trying.” Poppertastic!

‘So, for my seventeenth birthday I wanna be Marc Bolan-meets-Mikey Corleone-to discuss-Zarathustra don’t I. Only problem is, I’m donkey-working all day almost every day and living with mum in an A1 lay-by. In the pub bog one night I clocked my reflection – leathery Orangina skin, stringy T. Rex toupee, bad teeth – a right Rocky Horror Show. Smirk away all you like son – if you carry on the way you’re going, Zombie Eddie will be coming soon to a looking-glass near you… So I says to mirror monster – “How’s about a career in gold-bullion burglary? Consequences? Que sera sera.” In my worn-out hobnail boots and flayed flares, you’d have said the same wouldn’t you… won’t you? Now that is the question, not the one you’d ask, if you could only muster up the moxie. Sure, my plan B was plonkerish, but at least it demonstrated get-up-and-do-something-less-boring-instead.

‘So me and these two old barflys masterplan a remake of the El Paso heist in the Cockfosters Nat West. “And who’s gonna hold the shooter?” one geezer asks, while eyeballing me. And I’m like “No probs”; but there is a problem – we don’t actually have a piece. Still, that weren’t gonna stop the Home-Counties’ Butch Cassidy. So, on D-Day, I’ve slipped a chair leg up my sleeve, with the end poking out. And when I flash my wooden rifle tip at the cashiers, they freak and cough up, and we swagger out with the swag. However, at the meeting point we’re suddenly surrounded by laughing policemen. Weren’t hard to track us down, ‘cos it’d been snowing, and they’d followed our footprints. What a hitch-cock-up! Funny huh? Well, the charge weren’t – armed robbery for brandishing a chair leg equals five years in clink. Still, the way I saw it, anything was better than navvying ad nauseam-infinitum for chump change. Snigger on little barista boy – but when you wake up, smell the Costa, and realise you’ll be expressing for my generation forever, you’re sure to cry.

‘Inside, I went down with scurvy and eczema. But the real punishment began on my release. Down the boozer I may as well have been speaking Latin – about ancient history like Watergate – while everyone was going on about the action plans of the new PM Maggie Thatcher…

‘You seem a bit “enough already” boy. Got no time for the past? You’re wanted back in the beep-beep virtually ever-present? Well, you’re free to return to the Matrix… but, the red-pill reality is, you’re not free to stay in my attic fridge for free are you... so what’s it gonna be then, ADHD Olly? Your mobile moan or Ancient-mariner me? Good call. So, if you’re sitting uncomfortably again…

‘After a big dollop of porridge, you realise you can’t beat the system. I gave up nil-ist gangsterism as a teenage dream, switched back to plan A. Fortunately, the purchasing power of slave wages had gone up since I’d gone down. By drudging double time I could earn enough to pay the council £8-a-week for this here cabin (you do the math then go figure the opportunities for “independence” we had back then!). So I moved to this village full of Beaujolais Nouveau-riche like your folks, swapped my Bolan mop for a short-back-sided thatch, and lived monkishly until inflation and unemployment dipped. In that very mean time, I binged on the trending books – Freedman, Hayek – and subscribed to the FT (no, I don’t mean FaceTime, you Twitter) to figure out which way the flow was going, and suss the macro-eco-cosmic agents micromanaging my life.

‘It soon became obvs the industries, classes, and social services were going the way of the empire – Attila the Hen in No.10 wanted to detonate the whole olde-English shooting match – eat your bleeding heart out Johnny, her anarchy in the UK made yours look rotten! The Witch of the Midlands may have been wicked – and there was madness in her frack-society Methodism – but she did shake up the merry old land of Dope and Tory like nobody would dream of doing now. Lady Tina twigged that everything was up for grabs – status, individual and national identity, international relations, concepts, words, you name it – and she was bent on smashing the alternative Socialist utopias, replacing them with capitalist realism.

‘As explosives, she used the iron laws of the neo-liberal jungle, credit-card carnivals, 50% mortgages. Your generation won’t credit this, but if it fitted on the screens of our solar-powered calculators, the price was right, we could go on down to our local branch and borrow it. To clean out the bank we didn’t need a weapon now – cashiers plied us with swag. So every man Wayne of us bought into buy-now-pay-never-never. We snapped up our shacks, in the council-house sale of the century, crammed them with shiny tat. Mother Superior Maggie pontificated about “encouraging enlightened self-interest” but it was all about buying our votes, and shifting wealth from the public to the private, future to present, bottom to the top in a trickle-up stitch up…

‘As dirty-cheap credit pumped up house prices, gazillions were poured into construction – the projects multiplied and expanded, so did the scope for scams. So I assembled a gang of navvy droogs, and we’d nick bricks from the site and jerry-build our own shanties at weekends. We’d knock them up on marsh-and wasteland, knockdown price them, and still make a killing. After flogging ten shacks, we doubled up, double dared, and started stealing the land along with the materials. If we was working on a six-plot site we’d put up seven houses, do twelve on a ten. We’d build them closer together than they were on the plans, freeing up space for the extra homes, which we’d auction.

‘The contractors didn’t suss – they were too busy counting their lolly. Anyway, my scams were a few among many – and itsy-bitsy ones compared to the government-sponsored con that was house-price inflation (bet we’re on the same balance sheet there, hood). Like everyone else, I was running amok on Maggie’s farm, riding the asset-value wave. But, inevitably, it broke when demand for houses and stuff outstripped supply, and inflation skyrocketed. Maggiavelli’s City pals and middle-Englander voters didn’t want price rises eating into their stashes, so, having bought the ’87 election on tick, she turned Conservative, increased interest rates, pulled all the socio-eco ladders up. And what did rate increases make? Not prizes, not in the Ponzi game we’d been playing. The bumbailiffs started knocking on everyone’s doors with their battering rams. You do look a funny colour bud. The bobbies haven’t written… yet… have they? I told them we was still at the informal-threat stage...

‘I was one of the lucky few – my old mum had sold her flat at just the right time, so we made a deal – she’d square my mortgage if I’d let her move in with me and help her over the finish line, which I did, God rest and bless her. Still, those were hard times, with ginormous credit-card bills to service and no labouring work after the housing market collapsed. I had to rely on the village squirearchy network for cash-in-hand jobs, and doff my cap just like in feudal days. Don’t turn your spotty nose up, Mr Downwardly Mobile Phone – we’re all on capitalism’s Ferris wheel; will you be as sto-i-cool when you fall off?

‘Ultimately, the revolution ate Maggie, who was replaced by “Honest” John Major, whose only plan for the zombie economy was shock austerity therapy followed by more cheap and nasty credit. When people began borrowing to buy and build once more, I picked up the tools again. In ’92 I was at last ungeared so I went back into the gambling den. On credit, I bought three ex-council shanties. No prizes for guessing what I did next – patched them up, rented them out, not to the likes of you yet, but to those further down – and now out of – the fast-food chain.

‘At the century’s nasty turn, I put down the tools for good (very), donned my landlord-of-the manner and getup, and rent-collected full-time. Then I went large, used my houses as collateral to bloat my portfolio. By 2008 I owned twenty hovels. When the great smash-up came, I held on to them, figuring the banks, construction companies and home owners had lobbying power and governments would use public money to stabilise private asset prices. Labour being in charge made no difference – the Socialist alternative had collapsed with the Wall – “New Labour, same old frack-the-future thinking.”

‘And I was on the money – as you know, ‘cos you ain’t got none. Every year since 2008, I’ve jacked up the rent on my crumbling properties, while their value has squared. If I sold up now, I’d be a multi-millionaire. But I prefer to rake in rental from you lot forever – ‘cos you’ll never be able to buy, will you Mr “hashtag I’m not lovin’ it”? I’ve minimized tax by funnelling your money through Britain’s tax havens – the one empire on which the sun will never set, thanks to that dodgy Brexit referendum you lot couldn’t be bothered to vote in.

‘Thatcher and her heirs talked up property-owning democracy, power to responsible individualists, an economy galvanized by grads, while building a klepto-plutocracy where boomers enjoy eternal boom boom!, and you lot get eternal bust. Where will it end Oliver Twist? With what-the-Dickens workhouses? Feudal fortresses in downton, rotten-borough Luton?

‘So where does this leave you? Approximately at the nowhere I was, in ‘75, where all plan As lead to dead ends – except that there’s no welfare and council-house safety net now is there, Master Student Debt. After qualifying as a socio-path, how you gonna pay back SLCPLC while shelling out to me? By cashing in your monopolytechnic capital for a plumb job in this AI-overseen rentier-collects-all economy? Unlikely Einstein – it’s the food bank of mum and dad, plus virtual soma to get you through the coffee-shop slog and Deliveroo drudge.

‘Here, speaking of rent – let’s get down to the generational tax, and the real reason you called – to beg for a stay of execution on this month’s dues. Here’s my answer, to that 1000-pound question, in the King’s English this time – Frack you loser pay me! Go get a loan from your rents – the clue’s in the name, and they’ve got the generation-x factor – a mortgageable house – that’ll learn them for spawning a kid while stealing his future…

‘Ah! Now, that’s more like it! I was wondering when you’d react – props to you for refusing to take this sitting down, literally. ‘Cos while I ain’t guilty about what I done to you, I’d be embarrassed for you, if you’d have surrendered without a show of teeth and get up. I may be bourgeois now, but I ain’t petty – I still think youth should be daredevil-may-care, rebel-with-a-lost-cause, and that a son should defend his parents.

‘So, what does your huffing and puffing signify exactly – a peasant’s revolt? Hope so – it might liven up this once obscene and pleasant land. Truth is, it’s become uglier and duller since us lot took over – just look at Luton High Street – I wouldn’t be seen alive there now. And, fracking hell, it ain’t half getting hot an’ all. There’s no future for either of us anachronisms, and England’s sizzling.

‘Besides, being pitchforked would distract me from my declining and falling health, and the boredom of winning a rigged game. Fact is, I miss the on- and off-site shenanigans, the tales I used to spin about them. The unhappiest part of my happy-ever-after story is – I’ve got no material for yarns. As for good-old-bad-old-daying, where’s my audience? I’ve had more fun raconteuring to you, kiddo, than I ever have yakking with Nigella down the golf club. I pity your foolishness son – you’re lost without ideas and words – but being dumbstruck by digital does make you an A1 listener.

‘Tell you what, sideshow Olly, why don’t you come round Saturday for a beery brainstorming session about your plan B? Come on kid, next time the floor will be yours, I promise… there’ll be no more motormouthing or money-talks bullshit from me… please… pretty please…

‘“What about this month’s rent?” Good question. Fair play for popping it at last. I know, to make things interesting, let’s arm-wrestle for it. And, if you win, why not try punching my lights out, then walking off with some of swag? I wouldn’t take it personal; it’d be an adventure. Come on hoodie-winked barista boff, start grabbing back what’s yours…

January 10, 2026