My postie is on strike later this week.
Royal Mail have imposed a 2% pay rise which will see him a miserly £6 a week better off.
Poverty is a blight for those in and out of work as living costs rise.
But I’m often struck by how it’s not only a lack of money to enjoy life’s basic necessities which impoverishes us.
There’s another form of poverty which is crushing.
It can be dispiriting to be unable to appreciate what are sometimes described as the finer things in life.
Poverty of vision can be a crippling condition which robs some folk of the opportunity to enjoy all of the rich variety that life offers.
Whether it’s an absence of reading great authors or hearing great singers, some people are prisoners of their own penury of ambition and vision.
Reverse snobbery serves no one
I was in Glasgow last week to see Andrea Bocelli who straddles both opera and pop music.
It was a stunning performance with an almost spiritual quality.
A world class talent blessed with a heavenly voice, he was diagnosed with glaucoma early on and lost his sight after a football accident when he was 12 years-old.
Fellow Courier columnist Andrew Batchelor was right to say recently that opera is for everyone.
Proclaiming a dislike of something on the basis that “it’s not for the like of us” is a form of inverted snobbery.
It’s a phrase I’ve often heard in connection with the V&A in Dundee or the DCA.
The toe curling and cringing exclamation: “That’s no for the likes o us”.
But entrance is free, as are many exhibitions.
And others cost far less than admission to Dens Park or Tannadice.
Low income needn’t be a barrier to high culture
My late mum and dad and millions of others from working class backgrounds appreciated Maria Callas and Placido Domingo.
They were admirers of the great Irish tenor John McCormack, and the magnificent Welshman Harry Secombe, who was a fine singer as well as a comic actor.
A great example of how an art form which some think is reserved for the wealthy can appeal to all came at the World Cup in Italy in 1990.
Firstly Luciano Pavarotti’s solo rendition, followed by his collaboration with Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras of Nessun Dorma, soared to the heavens and captured the hearts of hundreds of millions throughout the world.
Great classical singing is for all of us and not just for toffs.
Granted it’s not always cheap to watch genius perform as my wallet will testify after seeing Bocelli.
But watching Barcelona or Real Madrid, or Michael McIntyre or Frankie Boyle, are just different types of art forms, and just as expensive businesses.
And great classics are all available and free on BBC Radio Three and Classic FM too.
Free your mind and expand your limitations
Reverse snobbery goes hand in hand with an ingrained lack of confidence and an inability to be at ease with and rejoice in things which are supposedly beyond our supposed ‘natural place’.
But no great knowledge of the mysteries of opera or of great art is required for the human spirit to be moved by a stunning voice or a gifted painter’s work or by watching or reading Shakespeare.
We should be able to enjoy great talents from Coldplay to Caruso, Madonna to Mario Lanza.
The only thing preventing many from enjoying some, but not others, are their own narrow and self imposed limitations.
So for those of you still thinking “that’s no for the likes of us”, believe me.
It’s exactly for the likes of us and we do ourselves a disservice believing otherwise.
Conversation