‘The Micawber Principle’ still has its merits in 2016

Country Living with Francis Farragher

I’ve always had sense of guilt that I don’t read enough and especially so when some of my colleagues can trip off the tongue a series of great tomes that they have consumed over a short space of time.

Last week, in the height of the gripping political dilemma faced by our country as the great chefs with all the top recipes refused to to go into the kitchen and prepare the meal, a memory from an attempt to read Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield a good few decades back came floating into my consciousness.

One of the great characters in that book was a Mr. Micawber who was always broke, long winded, wonderfully entertaining and eternally optimistic for no good reason.

His oft quoted definition of financial happiness – and misery – is always worthy of recall, whether it be in trying to have a few bob left over from the weekly budget for going to the pub or in the context of trying to balance the books in that far-off world of Kildare Street in Dublin.

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings and six pence – result happiness.

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought [0] and six pence – result misery.”

Now Wilkins Micawber, like a lot more of us, was not exactly renowned for ever being in a position of financial comfort, believing that something called ‘mutual confidence’ could sustain a man through various crises such as hunger, poverty and houselessness [now homelessness]. We all got a good dose of the legacy from mutual confidence from 2008 tot his present day.

In today’s era the political character who would represent the complete antithesis of Mr Micawber would be our current acting Finance Minister Michael Noonan, although not so on the definition of financial happiness and misery.

I recall last year an interview on Drivetime when Mary Wilson spiritedly posed a series of suggestions where money needed to be spent on all those sectors that we hear about every day. There was a pregnant pause from Michael Noonan before he uttered the line of: “But Mary, where am I going to get the money?”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.