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Don't knock the Great Depression. Back then, men were men

By Abigail Pennson, our reasonable, plain-speaking middle-class columnist who thinks we should declare Birmingham a landfill and be done with it

‘A NEW Great Depression may loom,’ says the BBC. ‘We could be going back to the 1930s,’ warns ITV. Am I the only one cheering and punching the air? 

‘They called it great for a reason,’ I howl at the television and its parade of castrated, bleating doomsayers. ‘We needed it. It gave us courage to start a revitalising war.’

But even though I am a licence-payer of 30 years standing, these so-called economists – if they knew what they were talking about they’d be billionaires running hedge funds, not whoring themselves for £45 soundbites on lunchtime news – didn’t listen.

For too long we’ve swallowed the same narrative about the Great Depression. It was terrible. Nobody had jobs. Families queued for bread. The Jarrow March came to London to claim the higher benefits available in the capital. Work camps, etcetera.

But when I look back at those stuttering black-and-white newsreels of starving families, I see a sincerity we’re sadly short of today. Proud men in rags, desperate to work. They didn’t care if they were down mines, strangling voles or losing limbs in corn threshers.

Contrast that to today’s WFH-WTF young men, who won’t even pop over to Ukraine to fly a few drones. To today’s girls demanding an OnlyFans account for their 16th birthdays. To our children, murdering then starring in inconclusive Netflix dramas about it.

That Depression – brought to us by benefits-cutting Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald, so we’ve got our man in place – gave us steel. It made us so belligerent we picked a fight with Hitler, who looking back was a poor unfortunate in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So to those bemoaning market-crashing tariffs just because they don’t like their author, I say embrace the possibilities of penury. See the best in beggary. From the depths of our national deprivation, we will rise again.

I should get through okay. I’m mortgage-free and I’ve got £200k in Bitcoin.

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Overpriced lingerie: the expectations versus the reality, with the Mash sex columnist

ASK any man with swollen nuts and a stagnant love life hoping nobody sees him in Ann Summers: spending unaffordable amounts on risqué lingerie is a sure route to a shag. 

But is it worth blowing what realistically is a month’s beer money on a few co-ordinated scraps of lace? This is the fantasy versus what will actually happen:

She’ll look like a supermodel

Your partner has a body that’s lived a life: a life of comfy desk chairs and family-size bars of Dairy Milk. A good life. But not a life compatible with mesh panties which make her buttocks look like netted salami.

The sexy elastic is digging in to create a four-buttcheek effect and the overall effect is less Victoria’s Secret and more Victoria’s Oversharing After Too Much Wine. The gentleman will be enthusiastic to get her out of it not because he finds her irresistible but because he’s trying not to get this image wedged in his head.

It’ll transform us into superior lovers

What’s lacking in your lovemaking cannot be bought in shops. Experience, passion and a shared understanding can’t be substituted for whispering ‘careful, you’ll rip it’ or ‘don’t ejaculate there, it’s hand-wash only’. And the items will be worn for mere minutes before he’s wedging his dick in as usual. The key difference being he won’t last as long.

I’ll get my money’s worth

Nice dream, but the demi-cup bra will soon be paired with industrial-strength period pants, while the lace knickers go unworn because she can’t risk an unexpected sneeze in anything that delicate. The only item that pays for itself it the corset with the clasps so fiddly neither of you can get it off for six hyperventilating hours.

She’ll seem as classy as a French courtesan

Effortless Gallic chic, as represented by your new chemise de nuit transparente, is not for those with a much-regretted teenage dolphin tattoo on their clavicle. That transforms the look from sultry to déchets de caravane, or trailer trash.

In fact, what she sees in the mirror is not a a concubine of Louis XVI but a perimenopausal panic-shopper who googled ‘how to reignite an eight-year relationship’ and leapt into the abyss without thinking things through. Which also describes the sex you’ll have.

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