THIS credit crunch is a great malarkey. Everywhere, you hear the clunk and scrape of hatches being battened down. Or so they tell us. But, as far as I can make out, the Big CC hasn't affected anyone yet.
Forget about the young not getting on to the property ladder. You shouldn't be allowed on the property ladder till you're 40. Our post-hippie generation would never have countenanced this brick-based profiteering. We worshipped poverty and worked har
d to attain it. But, today, 25-year-olds are mortgaged and insured up to their unpleasantly deodorised armpits. They should be living their lives in a carefree, if orderly, manner. Anyone making money on property before the age of 40 should have their assets confiscated. They should be sent on character-moulding courses, to make them less sensibly greedy and more hopelessly idealistic.
In the meantime, some top reports claim consumer spending rose in August, as folk found it difficult to break the habit of going up town on a Saturday afternoon and returning home with something superfluous in a carrier bag.
It's hard to imagine Broon behaving like that. He's the sort who loves going to the shops and buying nothing. You could picture him haggling in Lidl. But he is, as this column has pointed our for years, a chancer. In reality, he doesn't know the first thing about economics, and doesn't give a hoot aboot prudence. Consider his plans to borrow £100 million next year.
He's taking the country into penury, proving that British independence simply doesn't work. United Kingdom plc is about £63 billion in debt. Across the puddle, the American deficit is between $0.5 trillion and $4 trillion, depending on what you read. Nobody knows for sure. It's a detail. Yet here, in Scotia, the Patriots for London Rule are forever telling us that, under independence, there's a chance that, with fluctuating oil prices, we could fall 50 pence into the red. It would drive you up the wall living here. It's a nuthouse of a country.
However, a great thing about us all still being in Blighty is that we suffer together, standing by each other, rather than, say, the oil-rich northern bit prospering while the usury-based southern part suffered. So, from John of Groats to Bishop's Bottom, Britons are being encouraged to eat what citizens ate in the 1950s: pig's trotters, tripe, and oxtail. How offal!
This is food for savages. Comically enough, the food chain pushing this bizarre nonsense is Waitrose, where St John's ambulancemen are on permanent standby at the checkouts to deal with shoppers fainting when they get their bills. Waitrose will probably put the tripe into Cellophane-wrapped cartons with a delicious picture on the front of the ghastly repast tarted up in manzanilla sauce with a couple of olives and an oyster for garnish: yours for £7.99.
Despite these initiatives, top psychologists fear that folk might stop going oot altogether. Sure, we'll still shop. It's in our blood now. We'll be shopping at the closing-down sales five minutes before Armageddon. But we're not going to the pictures or eating oot so much. This has led population experts to predict a baby boom, with irresponsible couples whiling the time away in Biblical fashion.
However, there's a flipside: sales of maternity clothes are already booming. Then will come the need for nappies, toys and the restraining equipment necessary for childrearing. Shops engaged in this economic sphere will make profits, which will create jobs, which will put money into citizens' pockets, which they will spend, which will create more profits, which will create more jobs, which will provide more disposable income, which will fuel a desire to own property, which will lead to liberal lending, which will morph into reckless lending, which will see banks themselves borrowing unwisely, which will lead to their collapse, which will threaten the rest of the economy, which will lead to citizens staying in, which will lead to more nazzums, which will create more babies, and so it goes round and round. This is called capitalism. Everyone's a winner, except the losers.
I'm all for progress – so bring on Conway Twitty
BREAKING NEWS: Postman Pat has been equipped with a BlackBerry portable telephone. This is a good thing. Many citizens try to pickle a golden age, such as the 1950s, in aspic. But pickling gold in aspic never works. We must move on, even if things were better in the past. If we all stood still, where would be? Right here. For ever. Trapped in a Groundhog Day of credit crunches, cold toast and permanent sexual intercourse. It would drive you mad. Particularly the toast.
So Postman Pat embraces progress. How we like to imagine this glaikit public servant pootering through bucolic countryside, in his red van, with his neutered cat resting on his lap.
Now, in a radical makeover, he travels in a gyrocopter or a motorbike, with his BlackBerry jammed to his heid.
In future, it says here, he's going to be a "high octane" James Bond figure, delivering outsized items such as bouncy castles. This is outrageous! No! No! No! BlackBerry phones are one thing. But gyrocopters and James Bond? They've gone too far. Give us back the Pat we all know and love, tootling endlessly through vales and dales on traffic-free roads in eternal sunshine, with Sir Harold Macmillan on the throne and the pop charts dominated by Conway Twitty, Clyde Nutter, and Fats Domino and the Haemorrhoids.
I REGRET I will not be buying a toaster that prints the news. As you might imagine, the invention is the brainchild of a South Korean student.
He has entered it into a competition for useful household devices. But who would want the news printed on their toast?
Toast is a serious business. It should be served warm. Nothing irritates more than citizens who offer you toast, but serve it cold. What's the point of that? What's the point of warming it up to serve it cold? And if folk are going to read the news on their toast, the chances are it'll get cold.
South Korea may not be an evil country like North Korea, but it should monitor its students more closely, as well as closing all its borders to the outside world and broadcasting tinny propaganda music in every public square.
The full article contains 1086 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
