Tonight:
4°c
It's the new parlour game: trying to find upsides to the recession. There must be some. An end to boasting about property price rises, obviously; a growing sense of disgust with the gross luxuries we so coveted in the boom years - the competitive holidaying, the property makeovers. Perhaps out of hardship there will grow a new sense of values?
Where all this attempted good cheer has come to a crashing halt for me is with the collapse in the value of the pound against the euro. The money men have looked at Gordon Brown's efforts to save the world, as he revealingly put it, and given them a big thumbs down. They think this country is close to bust, compared with Europe, and they simply don't rate our money any more. The already appalling rate of exchange seems certain to go down a lot further yet.
One of the results of this is that it is henceforth going to be deterrently expensive for us to visit Europe, let alone plan to live there for any length of time, on British earnings. Helpful pundits have already told us we should think about switching our skiing to Aviemore. Next summer: swimming in The Wash.
I've had the particular good luck to be able to spend time regularly in France over the past 10 years. It has made me much happier in all kinds of ways and indeed more reconciled to living in England.
It's no secret that, with a much lower density of population than southern England, the countryside in France remains much more rural than here and that traditional ways of life have broken down less. But feeling that you belong, in however small a way, to another culture makes you feel much less trapped in your own, too. Having, however notionally, another place to call home is a great liberation.
I know that this has been a privileged way of carrying on but it is one that lots of British people have been able to share, one way or another. Inevitably it will become the preserve of fewer people.
That's why for me being priced out of Europe feels a lot more painful than thinking about giving up the car, surrendering club memberships, eating more plainly, or any other belt-tightenings.
We all know that the greed of the bankers and the ineptitude of politicians has crippled our economy. Only this week has it became apparent that their follies are also going to make Europe unaffordable - a life that many of us have come to cherish. Rightly or wrongly, somehow that feels like the worst national humiliation yet.
It's goodbye to the girls' gorilla
A saddening visit to London Zoo last weekend. In the splendid Gorilla Kingdom, opened just last year, there were only the grieving females, Mjuku, nine, Effie, 15, and Zaire, 34. Last week, their man, the silverback, Bobby, died unexpectedly at 25.
I wasn't able to go to the moment of remembrance on Wednesday, unfortunately, but I have been consulting the moving “book of condolence” set up on the zoo's website.
The keepers recall how “he would laze around on the island in the sunshine arms behind his head surrounded by his adoring girls”. Visitors are equally bereft. “I was devesated as i had the privelage of meeting this fine Gentleman on 9/11/08 and he filled my heart with love,” writes one admirer. He was, says another simply, “a magnificent silverback gorilla, a true ladies ape”. Quite so.
Now here was a real role model. In that way, his disappearance is a great loss not just to Mjuku, Effie and Zaire but to all London.
Kate's bow to holocaust chic
Kate Winslet has been nominated for a Golden Globe for her role the film The Reader, based on the novel by Bernard Schlink. She plays an ex-SS guard who has an affair with a 15-year-old boy who later is horrified to learn of her crimes. Some US critics have condemned it a work of “Holocaust chic which is all about sex, not mass murder”.
The film is faithful to the novel but the novel always seemed phoney. It is yet another tearjerker that has prospered despite its falsity — like Chris Cleave's Incendiary (adulterous mum loses hubby and boy in terrorist attack, writes to bin Laden) and Spoonface Steinberg by Lee Hall (autistic Jewish girl dying of cancer). The Reader, understood correctly, is laughable, too.
Reader views (1)
Not only prepare to stay in country prepare to stay at home, if the worst comes to pass.
Plans...water from the stream behind my house
Put in a garden in the front yard
Figure out to harvest the trees in the back yard for warmth
Take in the rest of the family
Learn basics...washing clothes by hand, walking, biking
- Elizabeth, Atlanta, GA, 16/12/2008 23:01
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