Christmas therapy

We went to see A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic tonight. From noir to cheese it had the lot - including Brussels sprouts on parachutes and a Tiny Tim who would melt the heart of even the most hardened Tory. Lots of contemporary messages in the show simply because the current government has taken us back to Victorian levels of poverty (relatively speaking). Jacob Rees-Mog would make a good Scrooge actually. He certainly has the looks but alas his character is irredeemable and therefore unbelievable.

Psychologically Scrooge is portrayed as a man who is emotionally crippled by fear of debt, a well known aspect of Dickens' own life as his father got himself thrown into debtors prison when Charles was a boy. As a result one of our greatest writers found himself doing child labour in a factory but on the plus side he collected a lot of material for his books and was able to hone his reputation as a social justice warrior.

The modern word chremetophobia encompasses fear of debt (and indeed fear of spending money). An author on the subject, one Doctor Daramus (who sounds like she could be straight out of a Dickens novel herself) has written on the subject. But the reality is that in this day and age it would be difficult to spot the difference between a rational and an irrational fear of money and debt. Most of us are scared at the nightmare that is Tory Britain in the 2020s and most of us think carefully about what we are spending our money on.