Morning:
14°c
How I enjoyed being photographed for this column. A small woman with a massive camera came round to my office and took hundreds and hundreds of pictures. Inevitably, one looked all right: if you took that many photographs of Gordon Brown you could probably find one that looked like Brad Pitt. In reality, sadly, I am a great deal more haggard than it suggests.
This is not surprising, because I am one of the London early-middle-aged. Never mind the Baby Boomers — we're the Baby Busters: a group that has been dealt one of the worst economic hands in living memory.
Even before this recession, the middle-aged were squashed between two lots of increasingly expensive dependants. Decent state education was abolished in the 1970s and the improvements Labour promised never materialised, so the better-off scrimped to pay for private schools. At the same time, cuts in funding for care for the elderly, plus increasing life-expectancy, left more and more people to care for their parents. And then the crash came.
Recessions tend to have a geographical bias. The one in the early Eighties affected the manufacturing North. The one in the early Nineties hit the property-owning South-East. The severity of the one we are now entering will ensure that nobody is untouched, but its origins in the financial-services industry mean that London, which has done better from the expansion of this business than anywhere else in the world over the past two decades, will probably suffer commensurately from its shrinkage.
Crashes also tend to hit the middle-aged hardest. Retired people are all right. They can't be fired; and even if the tanking stock markets blast holes in their company pension funds, they get prior claim on the assets over those who have not yet retired. Young people may lose their jobs but they don't have dependants to pay for, and when things start looking up again, they'll get other jobs.
The middle-aged have no such comfort, as I realised when I saw some friends at a birthday party recently. One had been running a company owned by a private equity firm. It wasn't meeting the terms of its loans with the banks and he had just been fired. Another had been out of a job for two years. His chances of getting another one have receded as the time he has spent out of work has lengthened and the job market has deteriorated. A third works for a commercial property company. He talks brightly of its prospects, but I suspect it is not long for this world.
My friends are all in their forties, and if the current downturn lasts at least five years, as I think it will, their chances of getting another job are limited. If they do get one, they're likely to have to accept large cuts in pay and status. That's happening already among my acquaintance. I know one former national newspaper editor who's unemployed, and another who's taken a modest public-sector job. Nothing wrong with that, but everything in life is relative; and a relative loss of status is relatively painful.
Still, the Government has come to my generation's help. If it continues to stack up mountains of debt at its current rate, our burdens may well seem like molehills compared to those of the next.
Caramba! Ruth was robbed
I have lost all faith in the British public since the ejection of Ruth Lorenzo from The X Factor. Even Simon Cowell, widely regarded as a vituperative misanthrope but in my view a man of wisdom and perspicacity, said she was fabulous. My partiality for her has, of course, everything to do with her talent and her seductively bizarre Spanish-Brummie accent, and nothing to do with the fact that she is a loud, dark-haired woman who likes sounding off in public.
* A little bright spot amid the gloom from Mintel, the market research company: 48 per cent of people say they are going to stop, or cut back on, buying organic food. Since there is no nutritional value to this stuff, and knobbly carrots with black bits on them taste no better than normal ones, the fad for overpriced organic food has always seemed to me to be the consequence of irrationality combined with gullibility. When people feel poor, they think twice about silly spending. Expect homeopathic remedies and nutritional supplements to follow organic food down the plughole.
Cast your vote for the Ugliest Statue in town
In order to enhance the reader experience, this column, like all cutting-edge media, is going interactive. The idea is that you send stuff in and I use it to fill this space and collect the money with a minimum of effort. As part of this exciting new approach, I am launching the “Ugliest Statue in London” contest, which will not only save me time and trouble but also help identify monstrosities we can tear down some idle weekend. Please use the form below to make your nomination. Mine, on the roof of the ICA, portrays the demon god Pazuzu. It is by Roberto Cuoghi, an Italian sculptor. Apparently, to find inspiration for his oeuvre, he “undertook an imaginary journey to Mesopotamia in the 7th century BC”. Pity he didn't stay there.
Emma Duncan is deputy editor of the Economist
Reader views (3)
The "Camdonian" statue in Lincoln's Inn Fields must surely take the prize. There is a photograph of the monster so judge for yourselves. It is scarcely a hundred yards from the Sir John Soane Museum, whose creator must be in torment at this blot on the lovely 18th century London square where he once lived. What it has to do with ordinary Camdonians is a mystery. English Heritage has come up with some imaginative plans to restore the Fields, but sadly the statue itself belongs to Camden, and is just outside the Fields where English Heritage cannot touch it. Surely it deserves a place outside Camden Town Hall, where the councillors who commissioned it can be reminded of what they have inflicted on those who come daily to enjoy the peaceful and harmonious surroundings which the statue so grievously insults.
- Stewart Boyd, London England
My nomination for the ugliest statue is the 'embracing couple' at St. Pancras station.Kitsch at its worst and hopelessly out of scale,it's an insult to the great Victorian creators of this magnificent building,and represents perfectly the'Disneyland' generation.John Betjeman must be turning in his grave...or more likely penning a suitably acerbic piece!
- B.W.Collins, London UK
Emma - Most food has goodness such as vitamins and minerals, whether or not organic. However organic doesn't contain additives such as colouring or pesticides which have been linked with cancer.
And have you ever tasted the difference between organically grown and mass produced? I am one of the 53% who will carry on buying organic, though I wish more of it was home-produced so that we could support our farmers.
- Jools, London
