The banks have buried their heads in the sand

Take the bankers: they had to go crawling to the taxpayer to be bailed out, but now look at them squirm. Barclays executives, fearful that their colossal bonuses will be capped, would rather eschew this recapitalisation in favour of funds from the Gulf.

I wonder, do these fat cats really stop to think how dubious the money Dubai and the other emirates have really is? Dubai is a financial market that sucks in the proceeds of international organised crime the way a whale sucks in krill; its shiny shopping malls and priapic skyscrapers are built by thousands of low-paid workers from the developing world, likened by critics to indentured slaves, its brothels stocked with trafficked women. But oh no, the Barclays boys want to go on scoffing - while denying what's on the end of their forks.

It's the same with their colleagues at HBOS and Lloyds TSB - will they merge or won't they? You might think this has to do with preserving jobs or what dividends they'll be able to offer shareholders. But these execs' consideration is only what's in it for them and how soon they'll be able to get back to trading the kind of derivatives that got us into this mess.

Yes, they're in denial, and so are the politicians who are desperate to get the interbank lending rate down. The say it's because they want the banks to start lending to businesses again, but the truth is that the whole financial system is hooked on the profits from short-term gambling.

And they're also in denial about the economy as a whole. They still think they can drag us out of recession by stimulating demand - that's what all the interest rate cuts and mooted tax cuts are meant to do. They want us punters, who already have a trillion quid's worth of unsecured credit card debt, to get back in those shops and spend, spend, spend!

There's only one problem with this plan: we consumers aren't in quite as much denial as our alleged betters. We've woken up and smelt the coffee - and it's been burnt, just like us.

I'm certain there isn't a quick fix to this recession, and I know you know it too. Our only problem lies in confronting the bankers and the politicians with their denial.

If only there was a psychotherapist who could put all our elites on the couch at once - and if only we had the money to pay for the treatment.

Sure-fire way to a sell-out

To the Donmar Warehouse for Strindberg's Creditors with Anna Chancellor in the role of Tekla, the twice-married temptress. Chancellor was superb in this piece — a love triangle warped by time and twisted by resentment. Given that she's my own ex-sister-in-law — a relationship the playwright would, no doubt, have approved of — I couldn't tell if I was suspending my disbelief more or less than usual.

I fear the success of David Greig's production — and the tininess of the venue — means that tickets are mighty scarce. But this is one production worth getting scalped for.

Even I've caught the PC bug

Edward Stourton of Radio 4's Today programme has made headlines by revealing that the Queen Mother once told him our EU allies were a bunch of "huns, wops and dagos". "Queen Mother a bigot" is up there with other great tautologous scoops such as the Pope's Roman faith. More interesting is Stourton's assertion in his book, It's a PC World, that almost everyone his age — 50 — or older, has changed the way they speak in response to political correctness.

I think he's being too restrictive: I've changed the way I write in response to PC, and I'm a stripling of 47. I have used the pronoun "she" to refer to the third person in general; and my youngest (aged seven) queried the use of "mankind" to refer to the generality of people when I was reading aloud to him the other day: "Why shouldn't it be "womankind?" he pointed out. Why not, indeed?