Standing profits

If my boy asks me for advice about his future employment, I’ve always recommended that he might think about a career in sport, war or capitalism. Forget Art, I say. Art is best left to neurotics. And though it can be a tempting career move in early adulthood, forget manual labour, too, I tell him. In manual work the harder you work the less you get paid. Fortunately he hasn’t mentioned university yet, thank goodness. We don’t want any talk in our house about going to university, thank you very much. We’d rather he took heroin than go to university.

Anyway, he’s 13 now and it looks like he’s shaping up nicely to take the capitalist route to happiness and fulfilment. Money mad my boy is. A saver, too, with a lively bank account and a heavy cash box under his bed.

On the morning of his 13th birthday my boy got himself a Saturday job filling the shelves of a small independent cheap-jack grocery shop. He’s already completely enamoured of the idea that his boss, Reg, can buy a vanload of poisonous crap from cash and carry, stack it on his dusty wooden shelves and make 50 or a 100 per cent profit out of it from the elderly poor of the town who flock to his shop like gulls to buy it. It is the beauty of the legality and simplicity of the exploitation, I think, that has fired his imagination. That and the fact that everyone’s happy with the outcome. Reg’s customers can’t believe their luck and Reg himself is on a permanent high. ‘That’s England for you,’ I told my boy when he ran it past me, looking for a comment. ‘Peasants run by spivs.’