Tired of the media’s obsession with the economy and who’s to blame for the state it’s in, and looking for something to cheer me up, I started rereading John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. I remembered it as a cheery story of some lovable Californian bums. And it is. But it’s full of strikingly topical notes. Steinbeck tells us that Mack and the workshy boys of the Palace Flop-house are “the Beauties, the Virtues, the Graces”, in a world “ruled by tigers with ulcers, rutted by strictured bulls, scavenged by blind jackals”. Then there’s Dora of the Bear Flag Restaurant, who, running a brothel, has to be “especially philanthropic”  to stay in business. Whether it’s a dance for the police pension fund or a collection for the Boy Scouts, “Dora’s unsung, unpublicised shameless dirty wages of sin lead the list of donations”. During the Depression, Dora saw “the hungry children of Cannery Row and the jobless fathers and the worried women, and Dora paid grocery bills right and left for two years and very nearly went broke in the process”. I don’t think the lap-dancing clubs those city boys frequented will be equally generous.