Tonight:
4°c
Five years ago, at the height of the folly, India Knight published a book called The Shops: How, Why and Where to Shop. At that time, buying luxury stuff she didn't need was her idea of heaven.
Now she's done a handbrake turn. She's bringing out The Thrift Book: Live Well and Spend Less. With just the same whole-hog ebullience, she's written a guide to parsimony, although she's careful not to call it that let alone cheese-paring or money-grubbing.
She knows perfectly well that someone of her background writing about thrift could look ridiculous "Pull the other one, Marie Antoinette, it's got a Sèvres cowbell on." But, she tells us, she had begun to find her own conspicuous consumption "slightly nauseating". And then she got served with her second set of bankruptcy papers at the same time as she had two books in the Top 10 bestseller charts
Obviously, the book was written before the full horror facing us was clear. Knight says no more than "a little belt-tightening might be in order" and suggests it will be great fun, and bring "some authenticity, some individualism, some soul into our lives". For some, maybe. For others, it'll be more homelessness, malnutrition and hypothermia.
Her best tips don't shun the obvious. Watch out for sell-by-date reductions. Go to Lidl. Make stock from chicken carcasses. Learn to sew. Use the library. Walk or cycle.
Others she admits she's never tried. She suggests keeping chickens. "I've toyed with the idea myself, but I'm not mad about birds (I hate their feet, also their beaks, also their eyes), so I've ho, ho chickened out."
And then again, there remain traces of grand seigneurism. She advises frequent short trips to Paris to lift the spirits, for example.
Knight may seem to have caught the zeitgeist but it's turned out to be a bigger wave than she could have known. We're all headed over the precipice now, trying to guess what awaits us. And "when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you", as Nietzsche said.
In our affluence, we used to gabble dreamily about "downsizing". Now thrift's in fashion, thrift is the key word for prettying up voluntary style-changes. "Thrift Chic", even, is the hot new accolade.
But it's all unreal. Those who can afford not to change their lives too much will soon get bored, while those who really face severe financial pressure would never use such an elective word as "thrift".
We don't yet have the right term for the impoverishment and dispossession many of us will face. Whatever it is, it'll be nothing like so genteel, I fear. Perhaps Dame Edna had the right idea. She used to wave up to the people in the cheapest seats and shout: "Hello, paups!"
Hackney does its bit for 2012
IAIN Sinclair complains that he has been banned by Hackney council from launching his next book, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, in a local library because he published a piece in the London Review of Books criticising the 2012 Olympics.
Obviously, it is idiotic of the council to ban Sinclair, the borough's most distinguished living writer after Harold Pinter. Still, this daft decision does have the virtue of drawing our attention to Sinclair's original essay.
Headlined The Scam of Scams, it's top stuff. Like all Sinclair's writing, it combines convoluted rhetoric with lots of footwork. He doesn't just issue sweeping condemnations from on high, he gets out there and trudges round the site. It's surely the best piece so far inspired by 2012. Hackney council has done well thus to bring it to our attention - and it would do even better now to make plenty of copies available in all its surviving libraries.
This Bond is licensed to bore
At the first showing of Quantum of Solace, in Leicester Square last week, there was an air of torpor in the audience. The more crashing and bashing there was on screen, the more those around me seemed to move from anticipation to boredom and restlessness. Me too.
That surprised me. I love action films but they work best when you care just a bit about what's going on. You need something between the chases, shooting and explosions: some little involvement or suspense. Now that they are structured like computer games, Bond films have become all action and nothing else.
Wittgenstein observed that though you might want as many plums as possible in your pudding, if it was all plums, there'd be no pudding. That's Quantum of Solace. No pudding.
