Credit crunch is raining down around our ears, crackling the airwaves and filling our bowls with news about stock exchanges and banks in trouble. Some people are tearing their newly grey hair out, desperate and suddenly unemployed after feeling like the prosperity of our cruise ship would go on forever. Some are pottering on exactly as they were before. Some folk are saying that a global economic slowdown is the very thing the planet needs: less money, less ability to buy, less needless consumption. Of course, and as usual, the people that can afford to hold opinions like that tend not to be the same people who’re struggling on sixtyone pounds a week dole money, but then again Marx was a wealthy man, and he had some nifty ideas.
I don’t know, I’m not knowledgeable about the economy, my brother was trying to explain it to me the other day and as far as I understand, it’s all to do with people borrowing money to buy houses they couldn’t afford. So I’m not going to offer up any insights here. You want opinions?
I think we could probably get used to growing our own cabbages, living in small-scale communities on as little as we physically need. We could find happiness there, in the daily detail of human existence. Disease would steal us away more often. Women would die in childbirth more often. Is the payoff worth it? More struggle, for a longer lasting world? Probably yes. But I’m typing on a laptop that didn’t grow on a tree; it grew on the back of a centuries-old whale of a monstereconomy that I can’t get my head round. It would be a twist and a screw that I would find as hard as the next man, to lose all this.
So here comes the wave: let’s see where it takes us this time.
If anyone’s got any tips on growing cabbages, let me know…
Peace and homegrown peas
Dizraeli