I was very glad to see that last week's Winging It had the words Louise East is on leave neatly tacked on the end, which struck me as immensely preferable to Louise East is on holidays. While the first could have the rather unfortunate implication that I had been asked to go and suffer from nerves or fiddle the books elsewhere, it also has a workmanlike quality to it, suggesting that Louise East was doing very important and dynamic tasks elsewhere. Louise East is on holidays on the other hand, just has too much of an air of beer and skittles about it. It seems to suggest that, once again, Louise East has cast her responsibilities to the four winds and gone on the skite, bad cess to her anyway.
Although I didn't have anything to do with the official explanation of my absence, I appreciated the wording because I've been doing a lot of spin doctoring myself recently. When people asked what I was up to last week, I would say I was going to France for a few days and then I was coming back to work on my house, always emphasising the shortness of my holiday ("just a long weekend really"), and the longness of the hours I intended to put in re-decorating. I would vaguely suggest I had serious work to do on the house, knocking down the odd wall for example, rather than just painting the place from top to bottom with the assistance of my father, which just didn't sound nearly arduous enough. When finally I caught myself implying I had an entirely fictitious case of rising damp to deal with, I was forced to examine my motivations for playing down my holiday. Why was I so anxious to stress the fact I was staying with friends rather than living it up in some glitzy hotel? And did everyone really need to know that I was only going for four days and not a full week? What makes this subterfuge even more contrary is the fact that I've never had any guilt about taking time off to travel, so it wasn't because of the sudden re-emergence of a long-buried work ethic.
I have, however, always felt the need to downplay the glamour, expense and ease of any holidays I take. When I tell people we went to France on family holidays, I will always add "on the ferry, camping of course", in case anybody should mistakenly presume we were personal guests of Brigitte Bardot in the south of France. Memories of New York are always peppered with references to sharing a tiny studio apartment with three friends, and I have a field day when it comes to describing my summer in Paris - working as a maid! Eating half a bread roll and a peach a day! Doing hair wraps to get money for dinner!
In part this is because of an almost obsessive need to portray events and memories as they really were and not as someone might imagine them to be. From an early age I was aware that my experiences sliding round the back seat of a bulging Renault estate as we circled some suburban roundabout in search of the campsite that was definitely on the map two hours ago, were essentially different to those of classmates who flew to Juan les Pins to stay in a hotel, or to Tenerife and a time-share apartment. My need to give people more information than they wanted was a need to communicate my kind of holiday and my kind of past.
Hand-in-hand with this is an urge to downplay the expense of any holiday, past or present; to let people know that they wouldn't find me blowing lots of cash on caviar, gigolos and fancy ice creams. This strategy of downplaying the expensive, is also brought into play when revealing the cost of a new coat, a computer, my rent, a haircut or a blow-out meal - any new expense will be justified as very necessary, relatively good value, or something that is so massively reduced as to be cheap at twice the price. It's not so much that I lie about the price of something (although I have been known to do this too), it's more that I highlight the fact I haven't splashed out lots of cash. Honest. Truth be told, I think a lot of people in Ireland have a complex relationship with wealth, or rather, they have a complex attitude to appearing too wealthy. It would be nice to think of this as common or garden decency, and to think of ourselves as a nation of people who did not like to boast when there are others less fortunate. Sadly, I think it has rather more to do with begrudgery - only a fool would bang on about their huge wealth and extreme good fortune knowing that everyone was waiting rather sullenly in the wings for their fall. So instead, acting the poor mouth became an established code of behaviour and everyone went to tremendous lengths to illustrate just how little money they had. At times it got a little like that Monty Python sketch with everyone trying to outdo each other with their poverty - "I got up before I went to bed, ate a cup of hot gravel and then spent 50 hours down t'mines." "You were lucky."
In more recent times, the need to downplay your own wealth would appear to have abated if not disappeared altogether. People chat about buying second homes or where the best place to go skiing is, without going into elaborate sagas about needing to travel for the sake of their health. Louis Vuitton, which was always one of those fashion labels which shouted its price tag using a microphone rather than murmuring sotto voce, has registered record sales since it was first introduced to Ireland last year. Perhaps the most obvious is the continuing success of VIP magazine which was initially dogged by suggestions that the publishers wouldn't find enough famous people to throw open their wonderful homes to fill the pages. Instead, the relatively well-known or just plain wealthy have been queuing up to show off their lifestyles, and ironically, it seems that readers don't mind how famous they are as long as the pictures are glossy enough. The art of begrudgery is dead, declared Irish Times columnist, John Waters, at the time of its first publication.
I have fairly mixed feelings about all of this. On the one hand, the current forthrightness about wealth is refreshing because it's honest - if you work hard, what's the problem? Being coy about your wads of cash might be in good taste but it hardly does anything to re-distribute society's wealth; all it essentially does is make you feel slightly better about being rich. Nor is being upfront about how wealthy you are likely to make those poorer than you feel worse - you're much more likely to feel jealous of the friend who has a pair of trainers you want than of the owner of Nike.
On the other hand, there is something repellent in people publicly glorying in wealth as though it somehow makes them a better person. Nobody is superior just because they have a bigger house or car or set of gold taps, but all too often, obvious displays of wealth are accompanied by a kind of self-belief that equates material strength with moral or mental strength. Possessions, and lots of them, are considered to be God's brownie points, doled out because their owner is a fine figure of humanity.
So that's why a kind of poor mouth will probably always exist, because there will always be people, like myself, who need to explain their own kind of wealth. Justifying a holiday is a way of telling people that I don't take it for granted, that I know how lucky I am to have just bought a house, and that it's not as extravagant as it sounds. Like many people in their 20s, I first began to have money in my pocket at the same time as the country did, and like the country, my new-found prosperity doesn't always sit easily. So forgive me if I protest about my good fortune just a little too much - my sense of perspective must be on leave.