I remember about a year and a half ago Clemmie Telford made a ‘baring her soul’ post about how her husband’s company had nearly gone bust and they’d been totally skint and on the bones of their arses but had been bailed out by family and were determined to pay the money back, etc.
Anyway, round about the time that they were supposedly skint, she’d been posting about buying two colours of the same Zara dress because it was so versatile.
Also, one of the examples she gave of how hard it was being skint was having to split the bill in a restaurant when out with friends when she’d been careful to only order the cheapest thing on the menu and not drink.
I haven’t been out with friends to a bloody restaurant in the last six months AT LEAST! Because DH and I are skint! We just don’t go out. And we don’t have rich families to ‘help us out’ with tens of thousands of pounds.
And then, right after the, ‘we stared into the abyss of poverty but pulled back from the brink’ post, they all went on a two week family holiday to Thailand.
It’s true, their ‘real world’ is just a million miles away from other people’s real world. And for them to keep pretending it’s not is coming across as more and more disingenuous.
For all her faults, there’s a good piece in Caitlin Moran’s Moranifesto book on the Tories and blithness. It really chimes with the whole mum thing on instagram. It’s blitheness incarnate.
And also what’s disingenuous and rubs people up the wrong way is when things like MOD’s ten millionth free holiday of the year is presented as something she ‘deserves’ because she’s so knackered and works so hard blah blah blah. Especially coming right off the back of a free dirty weekend away to ‘reconnect and recuperate’.
It would be easier to stomach if she just said, ‘fuck me, I don’t really know what I’ve done to deserve this beyond having a passably readable blog and a pair of twins, but I am incredibly lucky and grateful and intend to enjoy the fuck out of this massive privilege.’
Instead there’s this sort of ‘roll eyes’ ‘well it’s about TIME I got a break. It’s so exhausting living in my massive, perfect house with my perfect, healthy children and all my #gifted, expensive things. Finally I might actually be able to get away from the tedious drudge of it all.’
It all just leaves a nasty taste.