Scrounging I used to think was a sub-strain of the ultra-conservative genus. In other words, a trait found in people who were stingy or scrooge-like. While that may be generally true, I have come to revise my opinion. I believe scroungers abound irrespective of philosophical outlook.

An ultra-liberal could be a closet scrounger. Although the said ultra-liberal will be ultra-liberal with other people’s money — the hard earned takings of parents.

In the hit British comedy series of the 1990s, You Rang M’Lord? one of the characters is a local policeman whose long arm of the law happened to end in a grubby finger pointed directly at the kitchen of Lord Meldrum. Whenever a meal was to be had, just when the kitchen staff were about to sit down to it, in walked the policeman with a cheery greeting to all and sundry followed by a quick inquiry after the health of the day’s cuisine. He was respected — more for his uniform one suspects — and got to sample the choicest cuts of meats and cake.

Back in the day, it was normal for kitchen staff to reserve a good helping of the choicest bits for themselves. The lords and ladies upstairs were deluded into thinking the ones downstairs were a famished, undernourished lot subsisting on the peel of potatoes and leftover crumbs. Forward to the present and not much has changed. Kitchen staff — now reduced to a single maid in an apartment — still get to sample the best. “This has been done like a dog’s dinner,” has little or no truth to it in the context of what the kitchen staff generally get to dine on.

But harking back to the scrounger, it appears that they manifest themselves these days in various forms. Plus there’s a skill to it. One of those is to manipulate emotion. Blow cold & frosty, then blow warm & cheery. Especially if you’re an only child. The parents have misguidedly permitted him to enter the addictive portals of online shopping. Small bills become big bills; big bills tie one up in debt. Parents frown, scowl then mutter words of disenchantment whereupon sonny boy rears up and delivers the ‘cold & frosty’ performance, preceded by a grand verbal fight.

The parents slink away, upset. Sonny slinks away, too, thinking, give it time. Emotions are put on simmer over the next days. The parents wonder if they’ve been too tough. They make subtle overtures to bring about a thaw, a return to springtime. It is about the same time that sonny, from his sessions of endless browsing, has found something he needs desperately. He joins in the thawing overtures taking it to an extreme that make the parents’ hearts beat joyously.

Crossing paths

Here too, craft is employed. He showers endless love on mum, complimenting her cooking, hanging on her every word, teasing her, keeping her laughing, all the while waiting, waiting, waiting ... and then the pounce. “I need to get such and such article and it costs ...!!”

That’s scrounging in a revolving door situation.

Another type consists of the person who will be your friend and absolutely refuse to allow you to put your hand in your pocket to pay for a packet of chips. He will insist on paying. However, when the two of you sit down to a meal in a restaurant, for example, he will time his trip to the washroom to perfection, crossing paths with the waiter bringing the cheque to the table. On returning, ringing his wet hands like Pontius Pilate, he will feebly insist on paying, and lapse into mild protest when his insistence is rejected.

It will take a while before the pattern emerges, by which time he has moved on to another station of friendship. The halls of friendship are bedecked with suckers and bloodsuckers standing underneath the mistletoe — some admiring its decor some doomed to be pricked by the thorns. That’s life. As Scrooge would have said, clutching his moneybags: “And a Merry Christmas to you, too.”

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.