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22 January 2025

I’m all for a plasterer who shows off his loadsamoney

There was something gleefully life-affirming about this pickup-owning character.

By Nicholas Lezard

On the walk down to the shops I find my way partially blocked by an enormous Ford Ranger parked aggressively on most of the pavement. Luckily, I am slim, so I can squeeze through. For those who are hazy on motor vehicles, the Ford Ranger is a spectacularly ugly pick-up truck that looks like it beats up other pick-up trucks for fun. This one looks new and shiny and a little research tells me that one of these straight from the dealer’s forecourt will set you back £36,999. I wonder about that missing pound. I remember once hearing that shops charge you £4.99 for something not to make you think you’re paying £4, but to stop the person at the till pocketing your fiver: that one penny they hand you back means that they have to open the cash drawer. This is, I think, a specious explanation at best. Even I can be fooled into thinking that £4.99 is only four quid and a bit and not almost exactly £5. But surely, when you get into five-figure sums you start looking a little closer, no? Or are people with that kind of money just as stupid as people like me? I saw a letter from a reader a few weeks ago suggesting I go to “money school”. I found this an unhelpful suggestion, because the first thing they teach you at money school is “have some money”.

However, I didn’t have to speculate for very long about what the owner of the Ford Ranger did for a living, for his name and profession were emblazoned all over his car, and what he did for a living was plastering and damp-proofing. To underline the message, he had personalised number plates which spelled something almost, but not exactly, identical to his own name.

Such are the times we live in, I sighed, but I also smiled a little, for despite the modernity of the truck, I was whisked back nearly 40 years to the late Eighties, when the comedian Harry Enfield invented a character, a plasterer by trade, who would bound on to the stage waving a wad of banknotes, inviting us to marvel at his wealth by saying he had “LOADSAMONEY”.

Lord, how we laughed. No, really, we did: we very much looked forward to his appearance on the late-night comedy show (hosted by Ben Elton), because he was so thrillingly vulgar. At the time, my girlfriend and I both worked for the same publisher, which paid its staff even less than other publishers; I was living on a sofa in a living room in Earl’s Court, and she was lodging in the tiny spare room of an Indian architecture student in Brockley, a place I’d never heard of before. (Incidentally, I mention her landlord’s nationality because he made the best curries I have ever eaten; to this day, I dream about them.)

Anyway, the point is that we both were very far away from earning loadsamoney and yet we didn’t mind Loadsamoney’s cupidity at all. As for me, I had only the haziest idea what a plasterer did and I wasn’t sure how the trade could be monetised in such a clearly successful manner. After a while, I worked it out from context: a combination of gouging the middle class and insisting on cash-only payments.

And yet there was something gleefully life-affirming about Enfield’s character: he was not one of life’s moaners. And so the link between plastering and ostentation was forged in the British psyche. So I actually smiled as I squeezed through the narrow gap between the plasterer’s pick-up and the wall. It was so on the nose: he could afford the fancy truck, the personalised plates, and the parking fines, because he had, well, loadsamoney. I imagine there are plasterers who go around in a modest little van, which would make you think that this was one of those honest, ascetic plasterers, more philosopher than handyman, much given to sucking his teeth and saying that, alas, this job is going to cost you a little bit, I wish I could make it less but I’d be robbing myself, etc. Not this guy. He’d bound into your house and say, “This job is going to cost you so much it will make your head spin.”

After I’d done my shopping, about 20 minutes later, the truck was still there; it seemed to have grown in my absence. Despite this being on a fairly busy road, it had yet to be ticketed. I took a couple of photos for my amusement. I thought of sending them to one of the local Facebook groups I enjoy, which are a delightful mixture of pretty photographs and petty grievances, but decided against it. I’m not a grass, and also I suspected it would not be beyond Mr Loadsamoney’s capacity to track me down and run me over with his truck, which in my imagination now loomed over Brighton like one of those mind-bogglingly huge lorries you see in photos of basalt mines in Kazakhstan.

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So I wish him well, sort of. If I had to use a wheelchair or was pushing a pram, then my reaction would almost certainly have been very different. But there was a kind of honesty to this display, which said: if you hire me you had better have even more loadsamoney than me. Don’t say you weren’t warned. I wonder if this is the kind of thing they teach you in money school.

[See also: Southport and the changing face of terror]

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This article appears in the 22 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Messiah Complex