Anyone who has read Vanity Fair might recognise the title, and realise that I’m about to wax lyrical about the role that the much maligned c-word, “credit”, plays in my life.
I am not a big spender. I am not, for example, a great lover of shoes. I shouldn’t even need a credit card. Unfortunately, given the nature of my work, I never know how much money I am going to make in a month before it has arrived in my account. Meanwhile food must still be purchased, and the Oyster must still be fed. So, often, I will put things like food and transportation on the credit card so that I’ll have cash left over to pay for things like rent and bills, expenses that can’t be taken care of on credit. My mother assures me that this is a sensible way to avoid being evicted.
But when I think about it, it is a bit surreal. If when I add the bank balance to the credit card balance the result is zero, that should mean the same as if I actually had zero money. But it doesn’t. I can continue to pay bills as a functioning member of society as long as there’s a positive somewhere, even if it’s (more than) cancelled out by a negative elsewhere.
So it’s less about the actual amounts in each account, and more about the gradient between the two. Like osmosis, and the ATM is a semi-permeable membrane, and as long as cash can flow from an area of higher concentration to lower, I can get to work and eat dinner.
Furthermore, because this is mostly happening in numbers on a computer screen, with sometimes a little bit of plastic and a chip and PIN reader involved, it hardly seems real. If I actually have no money when I add all the accounts together, and no actual cash in my wallet, yet I can still go around and do pretty much anything I want, then surely I am living in a Star Trek-esque money-free economy based on, I dunno, love and trust and Vulcans. And well, that’s pretty okay. And I’m going to remember that the next time I start to worry about money. Pointy ears, yeah.
(Though, come to think of it, living well on nothing a year didn’t turn out so well for Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. Better for Reese Witherspoon, but only because liberties were taken with the film version. Must assess situation.)
