The role of the filthy lucre in helping us to enjoy our misery
Country Living with Francis Farragher
Many years ago, lively but good-humoured debates, used to swirl around our kitchen table, and especially so if the thresher man or maybe some young upstart from back the road who had the cheek to be going to a fancy third-level institution like UCG, were on the scene.
Neither my father nor the thresher man nor the young student had much by way of material wealth, so it was little wonder that there was some general agreement on the theme of money not making you happy. It was a kind of honour among thieves’ type of support mechanism.
How they could definitively say put the case forward against wealth, was kind of beyond me, because none of them (well the older two anyway) never really had any realistic chance of finding out whether this was the case or not. My father’s clinching line on the debate tended to be: “While money can’t buy happiness, it can help you to enjoy your misery.”
Maybe ‘like father, like son’ never did really capture the knack of putting together any decent stash of cash. Whenever any little windfall would arrive, there always seemed to be a hole to be plugged and it was always a good feeling to have enough to survive. But, or course, that little bit more for a smidgen of comfort would have been nice.
Some of the National Lottery ads are quite catchy in terms of the more outrageous things we might do if we scooped the big prize like setting up a giant water slide in the middle of a flats complex or in the purchase of an island in the middle of the Pacific. I’d always wonder though about getting planning permission for the water slide in Dublin’s inner-city or in making my way to and from that island in the middle of oceanic nowhere.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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