Hastings shore

Weep for England

'He came upon pale and graceful stone gates leading to some lost great estate with the National Trust's acorn on a road sign. He turned in and drove two miles down an avenue of limes. Families shrieked about him. He found a Gents and then returned stiffly to the Mercedes in the car park. People ran about taking plants from a garden shop to their cars to plant on their patios. If I had ever loved England, he thought, I would now weep for her. Sherwood forest watch him from every side, dense and black.'

from Jane Gardam's Old Filth (2004)

Deaths and derivatives

Here

England made me

'I'll walk to Bantry Street, thought Betty; his taxi might overtake me. And she struck out into the crowds. In her Agatha Christie country clothes and pearls and polished shoes, she strode among an elbowing, slovenly riff-raff who looked at her as if she were someone out of a play. Pain and dislike, bewilderment and fear, she thought in every face. Nobody at peace except the corpses in the doorways, the bundles with rags and bottles, and you can't call that peace. She dropped money into hats and boxes as she would never have done in Dacca or Shanghai, and would have been prosecuted for doing in Singapore. Beggars again in the streets of London, she thought. My world is over.'

from Jane Gardam's Old Filth (2004)

Quantum of solace?

Solace

Stiffen IMF sinews?

In the past the International Monetary Fund was consistently criticised by some for always imposing impoverishing austerity on the economies it supported for the sake of preserving the interests of foreign (mostly developed world) investors. More recently, under Christine Lagarde, it has sometimes called for a moderation of austerity to avoid driving 'rescued' or recovering economies deeper into recession. There was a famous little muted spat between the IMF and the UK Chancellor George Osborne on this subject. However, with the improving economic data from the UK, Osborne has been able to announce that his government has 'fixed the economy' - his phrase.Well, it's obvious, isn't it? The Labour government 'wrecked' the economies; the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition (but you can forget the secondary partners now) 'fixed' it. These things don't happen unless the people in control will them.

But now, as the federal reserve in the US, flirts nervously with the famous and long looming 'tapering' to withdraw the massive financial stimulus to the economy, rippling signs of dependency and withdrawal symptoms begin to appear. Christine Lagarde is on the case and has warned the World Economic Forum at Davos.

'This is clearly a new risk on the horizon and it needs to be closely watched ... How tapering takes place, at what speed, how it is communicated and what spillover effects it has, particularly in emerging markets.'

Larry Fink, chairman of fund manager BlackRock, saw it rather differently. He told the WEF that one of his concerns was the large positions held by investors in various emerging markets. However, he claimed that tapering was not the main problem. 'It's going to require much better domestic policy in these emerging markets.'

In other words the IMF needs to get a grip = like it used to have.

Oracles of our time

'But sources close to Blair insist that he is not in any way indulging in a mea culpa over past interventions by the west, including in Iraq. In the future, he writes, "the purpose should be to change the policy of governments; to start to treat this issue of religious extremism as an issue that is about religion as well as politics, to go to the roots of where a false view of religion is being promulgated and to make it a major item on the agenda of world leaders to combine effectively to combat it. This is a struggle that is only just beginning.'

The Gods have always used oracles and prophets. madmen and women hearing voices, to communicate their message to earth. The Greek Gods got a lot of fun about it; the God of the Jews, for all the famous Jewish sense of humour, was usually more serious and direct. His message was often Blair's: forsake a 'false sense of religion'.

Our Gods on earth, inhabiting their modern versions of Olympus - often located in the more expensive residential areas of London, can be recognised by their need, or privilege, to have their more gnomic utterances clarified, not by their own direct statements, but by hints and nuances by 'sources close to' or 'members of their inner circle'. (Rupert Murdoch famously has a 'representative on earth'. Of course we poor worshippers cannot be sure that the modern priesthood have always got things quite right or clear.

Tony Blair, like his erstwhile co-deity, George W Bush, clearly knows a thing or two about religion - and truth and falsehood.