{"id":1520,"date":"2016-06-22T15:13:11","date_gmt":"2016-06-22T14:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/writing\/?p=1520"},"modified":"2023-11-12T12:30:04","modified_gmt":"2023-11-12T12:30:04","slug":"buying-time-in-or-out-its-the-same-old-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/writing\/?p=1520","title":{"rendered":"Buying Time – In or Out it’s the same old story…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Buying Time<\/strong><\/p>\n

I’ve been buying time since I was born
\nIt is what the working class were made for
\nNo trust funds, no foreign holidays
\nNo gap year, no kindly Aunt’s dowry<\/p>\n

My father taught me to buy time
\nAny chance you get son take what you can
\nDon’t be dishonest, keep your pride, do good work
\nBut buy time, ten minutes here or an hour there<\/p>\n

Time is the one thing they can’t take back again
\nMy parents had to buy me into an education
\nSo that I didn’t have to buy time at twenty
\nMy mother cleaned council offices in the evening<\/p>\n

Just so that I could get through foundation art college
\nShe emptied bins, sometimes my sister and I beside her
\nOur little wage packets just enough to keep us all going
\nMy father would be asleep, exhausted, when we got back in<\/p>\n

We were all brought up to buy every moment of time
\nSo much so that even when I was older
\nI still thought of every dead end, crazy occupation
\nAs another means to buying time back later<\/p>\n

Then I hit fifty and my parents dead or dying
\nTime ran out, I saw time being buried in front of me
\nBut from their grave they handed me that precious thing
\nThey had bought their council house in the 1980s<\/p>\n

Now that council house was worth a whole lot of time
\nIt gave me and my sister some valuable breathing space
\nGave us both the very thing we never had much of
\nTime, simply time, the time I’m now buying off.<\/p>\n

Self-explanatory but I lost count of the number of times privileged i.e. wealthy middle class people have told me that life is what you make it, you make your own luck, you only have yourself to blame etc etc. BULLSHIT..this country is totally controlled and run by money and the class system has become MORE not less embedded in my lifetime. I would not have had a decent education in post Thatcher Britain because that is how the Middle Class voted and would like it to stay…if you poor you don’t get in the door…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Buying Time I’ve been buying time since I was born It is what the working class were made for No trust funds, no foreign holidays No gap year, no kindly Aunt’s dowry My father taught me to buy time Any chance you get son take what you can Don’t be dishonest, keep your pride, do…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[60,75,33,106,91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creative-writing","category-horseshoe-press-pamphlet","category-poetry","category-new-poems","category-working-class-poetry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6nhh-ow","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/writing\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/writing\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/writing\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/writing\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/writing\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1520"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/writing\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2921,"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/writing\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1520\/revisions\/2921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/writing\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/writing\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/writing\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}