So you want to know what's going to happen in 2012?

As a public service, here are my predictions for the new year:

• There will be a lot more talk about the likelihood of the Euro failure. It will either fail or it won’t fail. The Eurozone will still be in crisis at the end of the year.


• The London Olympics will take place. Everyone responsible for organising them will describe them as an outstanding success. Everyone caught up in the jams in London will describe them as a major pain in the backside.


• Obama will be re-elected to the White House in November. Or he will be beaten by Mitt Romney. The US will still be in crisis at the end of the year.


• The ratings agencies will make a whole series of baseless judgements about different national economies. Because the people who make the markets will slavishly follow the ratings, they will all be proved accurate. Governments will continue to allow the agencies to dictate their policies.


• The Chinese will discover the hard way that ‘overheating’ really is a phenomenon and you can’t sustain unsustainable growth indefinitely. Or they will have another boom year and that painful but salutary lesson will be postponed again.


• Germany will win the European football championships. Or they won’t in which case one of the other teams will. It might be Spain but then again it might not.


• In other football-related news, a leading star, faced with his 25-year old supermodel showing her age, will make a fool of himself with a seventeen year old mesmerised by his figure - the athletic one he shows on field and bedroom or the one in his bank account. He will try and fail to block publication of the story. Eventually he’ll find it cheaper to pay off the teenager, who will make the easiest 300 grand of her life, and the wife will stand Tammy Wynette-like, by her man’s earning potential.


• The Queen will celebrate her diamond jubilee. It will all be jolly wonderful. People in countries round the world who take joy in poking fun at the British monarchy will be glued to their TV screens to enjoy the pageantry. 


• David Cameron will do all he can to take credit for the jubilee as he’ll have no other achievements to his name. He’ll get a three-point bounce in the polls.


• The pope will piss off the followers of one of the World’s great religions. It might be the Catholics.


• The Tea Party in the States will continue to delight us by achieving that ideal and elusive balance, sought by our best dramatist in some of their finest plays, between side-splitting caricature and and naked menace.


• Sticking with the States, the day of rapture will be announced, will be prepared for by believers and will pass without their leaders offering a word of apology or learning an ounce of humility.


• And on the ounce of humility front, starting in mid-December forecasters will tell us what’s going to happen in 2013 without the slightest mention of what they previously told us was going to happen in 2012.

Happy New Year!

Submerged by the Brazilian surge

There was some shock in Britain this week at the discovery that the UK had been knocked off its position as sixth largest economy in the world to be overtaken – oh, indignity – by modest little Brazil. Modest and little because it has a population of only 190 million compared to our mighty 62 million, making Brazil barely three times bigger.

Well, OK, just over three times bigger.

I’m not quite sure what losing sixth slot means. We don’t make the cut? We don’t get to play in the final? That can’t be right. If you listen to the doom and gloom merchants, the final is already under way, and not the final match but the final act, and we’re all in it.

What I don’t understand is why it was such a big deal that most of the papers carried the story, as did the BBC. Surely if it's interesting at all, it’s a matter for congratulation, isn’t it? For far too long Brazil was struggling with poverty, crime and vile military regimes. They’ve apparently successfully put the military back into its box. Crime seems pretty much as endemic as ever. If they’ve started to make some inroads on poverty, well that has to be good news on two fronts out of three, and not something we should be getting upset about.

If anything, a bit more of the same would be good. Leaving to one side the issue of how much growth a resource-constrained world can stand, a bit more GDP per head would be good: in Brazil, it’s still about a third of Britain’s. So great that they’re doing better than they were, but a bit more of the same might be no bad thing.

As it happens, the people who brought us the news about Brazil’s move into sixth place do reckon they will keep doing better. Here’s the league table they produced:

  Source: ECBR

Now that table is just brilliant, in so many ways. Look at Germany dropping like a stone, leaving it hovering only just ahead of the UK; France even falls behind us.

And look at Russia and India just powering up the rankings. Heady stuff.

But that’s not what I mean about the table being brilliant. The brilliant bit is the stuff around it. Let’s start with the word ‘forecast’, on the column for 2020. Did they imagine that without it we would believe that they’d built a time machine, travelled to some time after 2020 to take a look at the state of the world, and then had the goodness to travel back and tell us what they had found out, not as a forecast but as a matter of historical record? 

Even more important is the source of the information. The ‘CEBR’ is the Centre for Economic and Business Research. That casts the notion of ‘forecast’ in a completely new light.

A Centre for Research of any kind just demands your respect, doesn’t it? 
If I pop down to the pub with four or five mates and we talk about the dire state of the world, that’s just whinging over a drink. But if we raise some money and take an office in a prestigious location and stick a brass plaque on the door with ‘Centre for Research’ on it, we become a reputable authority deserving to be taken seriously. Even if round the meeting table it’s the same five guys, with the same beer and the same brand of crisps.

Things are pretty much the same in those great centres of contemporary power, such as rating agencies. As I’ve said before, they’re seen as forces of nature expressing the will of God, or perhaps the will of the Market, insofar as they make any distinction between God and the Market, but in fact they’re just twelve guys sat around a table condemning Greece or Italy or anyone else that attracts their ire, to several more years misery.

Of course, you can't really compare these people with my five mates. These are experts in economics or business. Which makes them special. And I really mean special: economics and business experts are the only people who prevent weather forecasters being at the bottom of the mockery pile. Which presumably making them fundamental to the forecasting profession. If only in the sense that the fundament is the bit we all sit on.

Here’s a little illustration.This is the Guardian on 27 December talking about the Italian plan to sell more bonds in an auction over the following two days: ‘In an indication that traders fear the auction could prove expensive for Italy, the indebted country saw its 10-year cost of borrowing rise by about 11 basis points to 7.13%, before settling back below the psychologically important 7%.’

The following day, when things turned out rather better than expected in the first phase of the bond sale, the Guardian blog ran with the headline ‘Successful Italian bond sale cuts its borrowing costs’.

Then on the 29th, after the second auction didn’t raise quite as much as the maximum hoped for, the paper gave us ‘full details of today's Italian debt sale’ and commented ‘analysts aren't impressed.’

Yeah, right. Would these be the same analysts who were so concerned about Italian debt on Tuesday, reassured on Wednesday, now reverting to pessimistic type on Thursday?

Personally, I’ll reserve my admiration for economists until they get that time machine built.

In the meantime, all I can say is – ‘good on you, Brazilians. Doing well. Keep it up.’

Crazy about the Moon

The word ‘droll’ is one we don’t use enough these days. 

It means humorous, but in an odd or whimsical way and, since I rather like whimsy, I feel the word deserves an effort to rescue it from its gradual disappearance. To that end, what could be better that to dig out a little drollery from amongst the general misery that is the news these days?  

An item that recently caught my eye and got me smiling was the announcement that a group of scientists were launching a hunt for signs of visits by space aliens to our moon. 

Desirable residence for ET and his mates?

Why the Moon? ‘Although there is only a tiny probability that alien technology would have left traces on the moon in the form of an artefact or surface modification of lunar features,’ they wrote, ‘this location has the virtue of being close, and of preserving traces for an immense duration.’

So – we’re looking there because it’s easier than looking anywhere else.

I’m irresistibly reminded of the story of a man returning home late one night who comes across another on his hands and knees under a lamppost, anxiously searching the ground.

‘What’s the problem?’ asks the first man.

‘I’ve lost a contact lens,’ comes the reply.

‘Oh, I’ll help you,’ says our protagonist who gets down and starts looking too. But after twenty minutes of fruitless hunting, he stops and asks:

‘Are you sure you lost the contact lens here?’

‘Oh, no,’ says the other, ‘it was nowhere near here. But this is the only place with any light.’

We should salute those scientists for their keenness and their spirit of enterprise. And wish them every success in their droll endeavour.

Family time

Christmas is a family time, isn’t it? So it was great having Nicky, our youngest, with us. He pulled his weight too, even to the extent of trimming and scoring brussels sprouts for us. The product would be a major contribution to a most congenial Christmas evening with friends.

Contributing to human family and friends

Unfortunately the effort exhausted him, helped no doubt by a country walk in the morning followed by a reasonably generous helping of country beer.

And then to the feline component

It was wonderful to see that even in his unconscious state, however, he continued to contribute valuably to family life, providing an ideal place for Misty to take his own rest.

A merry Christmas in a Christian country

Sir Joseph Porter, First Lord of the Admiralty in Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore, declares that ‘it is one of the happiest characteristics of this glorious country that official utterances are invariably regarded as unanswerable.

So when it was announced the other day, by no less a figure than David Cameron, our great British Prime Minister, or at any rate Prime Minister of Great Britain, that the country we shared was Christian, how could I possibly answer the claim except by immediately concurring?

Cameron was speaking on Friday 16 December, at Oxford, addressing churchmen at an event to celebrate the fourth centenary of the King James’s Bible. This is the one I'm always being told is admirable for the quality of its poetry. So I opened my Bible at random and found myself reading 2 Samuel 8:2. Let’s see how the uplifting message blends with the glory of the language:

‘And he smote Moab, and measured them with a line, casting them down to the ground; even with two lines measured he to put to death, and with one full line to keep alive. And so the Moabites became David’s servants, and brought gifts.’

Too right: I’d become a servant and bring gifts if I’d just watched two thirds of my people cast down. Still, in that event I might perhaps console myself with the thought that it had at least been described in limpid and moving language  –  if that was my idea of limpid and moving language. 

But back to the other saintly David: ‘...what I am saying is that the Bible has helped to give Britain a set of values and morals which make Britain what it is today.’ Well, I’m sure he’s right. We don’t actually measure people in lines before we mow them down in Iraq or Afghanistan, but the rest we follow to the letter.

So it’s about values. Cameron made that explicit. And values matter to our Dave. As David Edgar pointed out in the Guardian on Monday 19December, Cameron’s speech contained a particularly telling passage:

‘A passively tolerant society says to its citizens, as long as you obey the law we will just leave you alone. It stands neutral between different values. But I believe a genuinely liberal country does much more; it believes in certain values and actively promotes them. We need to stand up for these values.’

So that’s the hidden agenda. The government’s going to tell us what our values are. Amazing how these enthusiasts for small government love to tell us how to think as soon as they get into office themselves.

‘We are a Christian country,’ Cameron assured us.

Interesting comment that. Lots of people say it, and I’ve often wondered how they measure it. Even Tearfund, which is a Christian charity with no obvious interest in understating religious practice in Britain, claims that only 15% of the population attend Church regularly (at least once a month). But if as he suggests, it’s values that matter to Cameron, perhaps what he means is that our society lives by Christian principle.

On the radio the other day, my favourite Churchman, Giles Fraser, quoted Luke 1:53. Luke being a book of the New Testament, as opposed to Samuel that I quoted above and which is in the Old, makes it perhaps a better test of what is specifically Christian. So what does it say? ‘He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.’

Well, you be the judge. Unemployment is approaching a thirty-year high. Among young people it is particularly disastrous, condemning a large portion of a generation to a life of employment insecurity. Social benefits are being withdrawn – one recent measure had the effect of plunging 100,000 children back into poverty. Meanwhile, bankers’ bonuses, after a brief dip in 2009, are back up to the pre-credit crunch level. And last year top executive earnings rose by an average of 49%.

Filling the hungry with good things? Sending the rich away empty?  Not sure that’s exactly what’s happening.

Still, it’s Christmas Eve. Not point in being a killjoy. Have a merry Christmas, all of you! Whether you’re Christian, of some other faith or of no faith at all. And whatever you think Christmas may actually mean.

Suitably Christian image for the season

... and a happy 2012! Which means one that proves the economists wrong...

Usurpation

Something odd has happened to our cat Misty. 

He’s always been good looking of course, and he’s also always been fun, but to enjoy that fun has in the past required a measure of sado-masochism. Particularly on my part.

He became quite wild and, frankly, a bit surly. He insisted on being let in early in the morning to have a bite to eat, after which he would slip out again, I presume for what the Americans so delicately call a comfort break, and then insist on being let in again. He would go and lie down for a day’s rest on one of the beds. So he was indoors at a time when, on most days, we were out.

In the evening he would have another snack and then demand to be let out, for most of the night, though he might come in for part of the evening, when he would lie on Danielle’s lap – she, by treating him with sternness and contempt, had won his respect and affection while I, by meeting his every wish and even anticipating some of them – I would stand by the back door while he primped and preened himself until he decided he was ready to go out – had earned only his utter disregard. If I tried to take him on my lap, he would scratch or even bite me. Scratching, followed by biting if I didn't attend to him quickly enough, was also the way he would attract my attention, when he wanted more food, some water or for me to get out of his way when he wanted to climb up on to Danielle’s lap.

Well, recently he’s completely changed. He comes up to be stroked, even by me, he purrs all the time, he spends far longer indoors (admittedly, the weather isn't really conducive to being outside) and he’s just generally much nicer. Why, he’s even taken to lying on my lap when Danielle’s isn’t available. When he does that my legs basically freeze so I don’t cause him any inconvenience, and I stroke him as though stroking a cat was going out of fashion, for just as long as he condescends to stay.

It’s quite extraordinary. He seems to like our little corner of Luton and apparently feels more relaxed there. It’s a wonderful and most welcome change.

In one direction, though, Misty always showed great affection, even in his fierce and aggressive time. That was to our dog Janka. Misty will regularly lie on one of Janka’s mats and when she comes near, he tries to get her to lie down next to him, reaching out with a paw to try to pull her alongside him. It doesn’t often work. She seems rather to resent finding him on one of her mats, as well she might.

Not that she dislikes him particularly. She just seems to regard him as a piece of the family that she’s content to have with us, but little more.

Now Janka’s very good at divining when we’re going to bed. She’ll ignore any number of trips upstairs when, somehow, she knows we’re going to come down again. She somehow knows, however, when it’s definitive, when we’re turning in for the night. Then she scrambles upstairs and into the bedroom, to stretch out on her no 2 mat, by our bed (on Danielle's side, of course).

Not last night. I interrupted my tooth-brushing when I heard Janka emit a few low, querulous barks. When I emerged I found her trying to go into another bedroom – not ours at all. It was dark and uninhabited but still she wanted to get in. So I took a look at our room and understood why she was upset: Misty had appropriated Janka’s mat. Clearly, as always, he was hoping Janka would join her, but though that was obvious to us, it wasn’t to Janka. All she saw was a very large cat hogging pretty well all of her much cherished bed. An interloper. An occupying force. A usurper.

The usurper ensconced on Janka's bed

She barked. ‘What the hell are you doing, you crazy cat?’ she was obviously snarling, ‘find your own bed – that one’s mine.’

Eventually she drove him out. ‘Be like that,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘I was only trying to be friendly.’

Eviction by the rightful owner

Janka couldn’t see the warmth. Misty couldn’t see that he had invaded her space.

Some tension between the two of them, then. But  for my part I’m just delighted that I’m not at the receiving end of any from Misty. I can’t remember when he last bit me. Long may it remain that way.

Delicate elephant steps

Finding out where an artist turns for inspiration can often raise a smile. For instance, I love the fact that the little door in Alice in Wonderland giving a glimpse of a beautiful and unreachable garden, is based on the door cut in wall of Oxford’s Christchurch Chapel, so that the real life Alice’s father could get easily from his garden into the main part of the college.

So it was a pleasure to find out why a good friend of ours in Strasbourg, Marie-Paule Lesage, decided to include images of elephants in her engravings.

She came across elephants during two trips to Laos. The first taught her to admire and delight in the paradox of the delicacy and lightness of these huge animals. She decided to go back and produce engravings based on elephants – and then have them help her with the printing, by getting them to press the plates under their feet.

But it turned out to be an uphill task. Elephants are fastidiously careful about where they put their feet, and very sensitive about who touches them. Having given up trying to get an elephant to help her with her printing, Marie-Paule decided just to try to draw outlines of their feet on the wooden plates, but even that proved elusive work.

Lively dance between artist and elephant

Her film shows how the elephant would place a foot briefly on a sheet of plywood and, as soon as she felt Marie-Paule’s pencil drawing around her toes, she would pull it back.

The result? Thin, floating, eery lines, overlapping each other and painting a picture of this strange dance between a gentle giant and an artist.

Marie-Paule Lesage tracings of an elephant's foot