I’ve been taking my time for a long time

Putting my feet up a lot

Speaking English as a foreign language

any words that I haven’t forgot

I’ve been thinking how I can’t be bothered

to wash the dishes or remake the bed

What’s the point when I could doss instead?

I’ve been hanging out with various riff-raff

somewhere on the Goldhawk Road

I don’t think it’s gonna be much longer

’til I’m mugging up on the penal code

Love is a bourgeois construct

so I’ve given up on the bourgeoisie

Like all their aspirations, it’s a fantasy

When you walked out you did me a favour

you made me see reality

that love is a bourgeois construct

It’s a blatant fallacy

You won’t see me with a bunch of roses

promising fidelity

Love doesn’t mean a thing to me

Talking tough and feeling bitter

but better now it’s clear to me

that love is a bourgeois construct

so I’ve given up the bourgeoisie

While the bankers all get their bonuses

I’ll just get along with what I’ve got

Watching the weeds in the garden

Putting my feet up a lot

I’ll explore the outer limits of boredom

moaning periodically

Just a full-time, lonely layabout

that’s me

When you walked out you did me a favour

It’s absolutely clear to me

that love is a bourgeois construct

just like they said at university

I’ll be taking my time for a long time

with all the Schadenfreude it’s cost

calculating what you’ve lost

Now I’m digging through my student paperbacks

Flicking through Karl Marx again

Searching for the soul of England

Drinking tea like Tony Benn

Love is just a bourgeois construct

so I’m giving up the bourgeoisie

until you come back to me

Talking tough and feeling bitter

but better now it’s clear to me

that love is a bourgeois construct

so I’ve given up the bourgeoisie

2012. I suppose I’m always looking for a new idea for a love song and this one was inspired by a passage in David Lodge’s 1988 novel, Nice Work, in which the manager of an engineering plant falls in love with a feminist university professor:

‘I’ve been in love with you for weeks.’

‘There’s no such thing,’ she says. ‘It’s a rhetorical device. It’s a bourgeois fallacy.’

‘Haven’t you ever been in love, then?’

‘When I was younger,’ she says, ‘I allowed myself to be constructed by the discourse of romantic love for a while, yes.’

‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘We aren’t essences, Vic. We aren’t unique individual essences existing prior to language. There is only language.’

 

The contrast between the notion of ‘love’ and the language of ‘bourgeois construct’ appealed to me and so it turned into a story about a hapless intellectual whose lover has deserted him.