Late-night liquidity worries haunt the land in lockdown

Every time I wake in the night now, I get a sense that throughout the city and the countryside there are younger men and women who’ve been woken by a much harder emergency than an ageing bladder, in fact by that most biting anxiety associated with money worries.

I know people think writers have it easy, but in fact one thing afflicts the writer as it does the life of the most careful farmer. Liquidity shortage. Liquidity shortage is merely a posh way of saying “sweating blood at 3am”. At 3am we are least equipped to address anxieties or to repel them, which is why Napoleon always said it was the best time to attack. Farmers and writers are both paid in a heap irregularly. Sometimes we are paid in less of a heap than we expected. So when a royalty statement comes in by email, it’s enough gambling to keep me happy, in that you don’t know until you open it whether it will say $52.17 or, to pluck a nicer figure out of the air, $65,210.53. The expectation associated with royalty statements makes messing around with one-armed bandits and racehorses look dull by comparison.

Liquidity shortage happened even to Dickens. In 1843 he published, after bestsellers, a brilliant book named Martin Chuzzlewit, still in print to this day, but one that at the time didn’t match the sales of Oliver Twist. His publishers, in the charming idiom they still use, changed their cry from, “We did very well with your last book” to, “You aren’t selling many of the new one, Charles”. He was planning to slip away with his family to Europe, but stayed long enough to write A Christmas Carol, which ended his worries.

But Dickens, who was pathologically terrified of debt, would utter, through the mouth of his character Mr Micawber, his own best-known aphorism on being in debt. Micawber is a character he actually sent to Australia, and one who, by the end of David Copperfield, has become a magistrate in a fictional place called Port Middlebay. ‘“My other piece of advice, Copperfield,” said Mr Micawber, before departing Britain, “you know. Annual income twentypounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and – and in short you are forever floored.”

This modest re-emergence of business happening at the moment, and the reassertion of human society and reopening of schools, is all urgently important not only economically but in that we do not want it to go hand-in-hand with a new surge of COVID. Let us hope we have earned by our care thus far some epidemiological elbow room, in which we can achieve something like Micawber’s definition of happiness. May your liquidity be more liquid than not. As for us old blokes – well, we have our 3am bladders.

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So, nursery rhyme. I know you’ve been sweating for it.

The Ovine Splits (Mary Had a Little Lamb)

This gal named Mary, had the cutest lamb.

But the ovine splits, Ali-kazzam!

Mary goes to the teacher, she says, ‘Hey Teach,

I miss that lamb, she’s a goddam peach.’

And the teacher says, ‘Mary, I bin meanin’ to say,

You cain’t bring a lamb to school that way,

It’s against Town Ordnance 74,

I hate to tell you when you feel so poor.’

Mary gets in a rage and fills with hate.

She says, ‘Teach, you’re beginnin’ to discriminate,

Just becos’ you prefer your lamb on a plate.’

Mary hired a gumshoe to track her lamb,

And rescued her from a car-hire jam

Involving grass and a plausible ram.

She said, ‘Lambie, you stick by my knee,

And we won’t have to pay no lawyer’s fee.

Here is what I guarantee: you’ll get an A in Geometry.’

This column is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund and the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.