| I generally find that the less money I've got the more hung up on it I tend to be.
Although the threat of redundancy has been quite real for the last few years and I pretty much get employed from project to project, and even though we've had all pay increase frozen for the last 3 years which has seen me slipping behind people in other companies, I've got a pretty good job which pays well.
But I know what it's like in the world of big, big debt. My wife had a flourishing little DTP business right back in it's earliest days around 1987, but it went under in the big recession at the tail end of 1990. The fallout from this business folding went on for 10 years of continual debt and fear of opening the mail in case somebody was taking us to court. At one stage it got so bad that we lliterally scraped down the back of the sofa to find money for food, and when we found none, the whole family lived on porridge oats for a week until payday. From a position where, for quite a few years, we had a combined income of around four or five times the national average, we suddenly found ourselves with absolutely nothing and a mountain of business debt.
Painful times, but would I have had it any other way? No.
It taught me a lot. It taught me that anybody, and I mean anybody, could find themselves in that position overnight. It taught me that my marriage can withstand pressures that not many marriages have to go through, it taught me that the most important thing you can give to your kids is love instead of the latest Nike trainers, and I hope it turned me from a brash, boastful, money grubbing snot into somebody with a sense of fair play, balance and humility.
I fully accept that, unless I win the lottery, or wake up and find I've turned into Bill Gates, that a lot of people are always going to have a lot more money than me. Good luck to all of them. Unless they're the likes of Prince Edward they've probably worked hard for it, taken risks and come up trumps.
If that manifests itself on this site as those people being able to cover their Ducati in expensive billet and carbon, or have multiple bikes, or being able to race? Fantastic. Don't begrudge it at all.
What I do begrudge are the (thankfully few) comments such as (and I'm obviously paraphrasing here) "Oh, you've just got the baby R then" from a 999R owner to the proud owner of a new 749R. Frankly, I find that patronising.
I will also freely admit that I would have liked to see the DesmoDue rules made tighter from the start. The very first announcement of the series indicated that it was intended for the novice and was specifically set out to avoid 'cheque book' racing. Having taken part in a fair bit of motorsport, I'm not naive enough to think that you can race with anything other than a fair sized healthy cheque book. However, it's clear that some people have a significant advantage simply because, with the rules as they are, they can afford a more competitive machine. So I would like to see some of the shoestring teams beat the relatively well funded ones, but that's not because I'm green with envy over the sze of some peoples bank balance, it's simply because I've always supported the underdog.  |