When you don’t have enough money to buy the cheapest bottle of wine, it’s hard to feel for the financial plight of Premiership footballers

In what I fear is becoming a recurring motif, times are tight at the Hovel. Because my housemate Razors and I are – despite our superficial inclinations towards degeneracy and depravity – reasonably decent and fulfil our obligations to friends and family as soon as we can, we find ourselves in the position of being, to use the sometimes forbidding jargon of the accountant, completely screwed.

The casual visitor to the Hovel will notice, on top of the washing machine, a small pile of loose change, entirely composed of currency no larger in value than a twenty-pence piece; these are what we fished out of our pockets when we thought, earlier this evening, that we might be able to scrape enough together to buy a bottle of wine. We have enough, it turns out, to buy a carton of condemned orange juice and a jumbo packet of cheese balls, neither of which we are really in the mood for. They would not, we feel, address our despair.

We have, some would say, only ourselves to blame. In my case, I blew the last of the month’s money (financed by a postdated cheque to the guvnor of the Duke, it has to be said) on a weekend trip to Cambridge, to entertain (and be entertained by) an old and good friend who is also broke but who would give me the shirt off her back if she could. In Razors’s case it was a matter of being obliged, strongly against his will, to pay for a dinner, the details of which even this column considers it best to pass over in silence. Let’s just say that my weekend was a lot more fun than his.

The funny thing is, this is not credit crunch stuff. When the CC happened and people started whining about, say, having to contemplate the horror of taking their kids out of private school, I found it hard to empathise, if not to sympathise, with their pain, on the grounds that I never, even at the high point of my wealth, could have afforded to put my cat, let alone a child, through private education (nor would I have wanted to – I think it best that cats mix with other cats from all social backgrounds, and do not learn to give themselves airs and graces that prevent them from mixing with less privileged felines who may have just as much to offer in the long run).

No, I’ve been living in my own credit crunch for some while now. Bring it on, I say. “Timely” is one of the more pleasing and helpful compliments this column has been given, and just because its familiarity with penury has been as much a function of its author’s indolence and incompetence as the prevailing economic circumstances does not invalidate its reflections on injustice, which has become more marked and obvious in the past few months. In fact, things have now got so bad that I sometimes wonder why there hasn’t been some kind of violent revolution.

It is a historical accident that whatever tepid support I have to give to one of the nation’s football teams is directed towards Arsenal. This is because when I was seven years old, the school bully promised to flush my head down the toilet unless I endorsed the team for the rest of my life, a deal I readily assented to, on the grounds that they were in line for winning the double that year, weren’t based too far from home, and my head was in the toilet bowl at the time. Yes, why not have Arsenal as a proxy repository for my personal hopes and dreams, I thought.

Anyway. Having been pleased at the manager Arsène Wenger’s signing of the exciting and talented Russian striker Andrey Arshavin, I was recently disgusted to discover that he wants his £80,000-a-week salary to be paid as an interest-free loan so that he doesn’t have to worry about the new 50 per cent tax rate. One has become slightly less inured to the greed and insensitiveness of the wealthy footballer than one used to be, and this is taking the biscuit.

I could name several friends, writers, teachers, and so on, of incomparable talent, industry and worth, even more broke than I am, who live lives of complete blamelessness; where is their reward on earth? When I talk about socialism to my children, when they need help with their ancient history homework, I feel like Doctor Cornelius, the tutor who, in fear of his life, tells the young Prince Caspian the tales of ancient Narnia.

After a brief discussion of Arshavin’s salary, Razors and I went over to the washing machine and looked again at our pathetic pile of cash. We wondered how long it would take Arshavin to earn it. I’ve done the maths: 0.315 of a second, assuming that our combined worldly wealth amounts to £2.50. I know it’s a bit clichéd to use the footballer’s salary as a yardstick of outrage, but there is a reason why some things become clichés. It’s time to start baying for blood.

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