I’ve been broke most of my life, and occasionally poor. Being poor means you’re in danger of being evicted, you ‘fast’ because you’ve run out of food money, you walk 5 miles through a crack ghetto to save bus fare, you sell cherished books for pennies, you help yourself to left-over food in cafes; you end up sleeping on someone’s sofa and eating out of bins. Being broke just means you can’t afford anything nice; or you can have one thing but not another — so you can go to the cinema but then you can’t buy a new CD. Pleasures tend to be strictly metered.

I am at present broke but edging towards poverty. It does, however, have its consolations. For example, as I write, in the North of England, it is half past nine on a Sunday evening and the shops are closed. I have eaten nothing except two apples and five oat cakes, each about 50 calories. I slept in late so will probably only turn in long after midnight. At some point I will become hungry; if so, I will either toast a crumpet, or simply drink more green tea. I could have gone shopping but my wallet said no, and it will do me no harm to live on apples and oatcakes for a day or two. This is a pleasurable hunger; it is not the dieter’s self-denying hunger, which is indeed a hard and grim ordeal; it is enjoyable, because you know you are saving money, and that is always a good thing.

When money is tight little things take on value: finding 50 pence on the street is a major find, cause for celebration; if the supermarket reduces a pie from £3 to £1 you feel you have cheated the Man and won a great victory against Evil Top-Hat-Wearing-Capitalists; if your local library has an expensive new book on the shelf, you have, once more, triumphed against the System.

When I began buying books and music and films, aged 19 or so, I had to do so out of my food money. I would give up puddings and biscuits for a fortnight so I could buy a new book. I look around my garret now, with its 500 or more books, many of which I must now cull, and remember my 19-year-old-self and his prized library: about 20 books — William Burroughs, Camus, Nietzsche, TS Eliot, Yeats, Blake, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Conrad. Each book represented sacrifice; I didn’t idly buy these books — I would fantasize about each purchase for weeks in advance; in the supermarket, my hand reached out for a packet of biscuits — the thought of a lusted-after copy of Beyond Good and Evil interposed itself like a Homeric god on the battlefield — sometimes Nietzsche prevailed, sometimes not. I was no saint when it came to biscuits.

And music! Back in 1995, in England at least, a new CD couldn’t be had for under a king’s ransom. A new Beatles album meant weeks of deprivation. My hand would tremble as I took Revolver to the till. Back home, I would coo over my new treasure like a thorough lunatic. It would be played and played and played, till I grew so sick of the Beatles I couldn’t listen to them for a good 5 years. When I bought a new album, by God I listened to it.

I now have about 500 CDs. Some of them I haven’t listened to more than a dozen times; nothing wrong with them, they just don’t grab me. I am surrounded by things that have no hold on me, but which burden me nonetheless — I can’t just pack up my possessions in 30 minutes; last time, it took more like 6 hours and precipitated a nearly-lethal asthma attack. My hundreds of CDs, my hundreds of books, don’t actually mean more to me than my 19-year-old’s 20 CDs and books; perhaps there is a fairly static quantity of attachment, and if you have more things, you simply care about each thing less.

In about 6 weeks I’m planning to leave my country and go to Europe to TEFL (Teach English as a Foreign Language). I don’t even know where I’ll be, yet. In preparation I have put my CDs on an ipod, and I am vigorously culling my books. What I can’t take with me goes in a friend’s garage, and will most likely stay there for a good long time.

I think of Tom Cruise’s assassin in Collateral, arriving in an airport with everything he needs in a briefcase. If I could, I would reduce everything in my life to such exact proportions. Being broke is an excellent discipline, albeit not one I have chosen. Right now, hunger growing in me, everything has value, everything is weighted and considered, and this is how it should be.

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