MY, everyone seems cheery all of a sudden. Apparently, the economy has turned the corner and good times are not too far away. It seems that, in the words of that well-known economic commentator, the late John Peel, there has been a 'hard grey winter' but now: 'It will be a long and ecstatic summer.'
Yes, maybe. It seems to me that the big question is which year we are in, historically speaking. So if this is 1933, the auguries are pretty good. Earnings and the general mood were both downbeat, but beneath the surface a range of new industries - nylon, rayon, bakelite, radio, motor manufacture, new alloys - were taking root in communities away from the old industrial heartlands. By 1934, it seemed that a half-decent recovery was under way, which had the happy side effect of dishing the chances of the British fascist movement.
But suppose this is 1973, a year the first half of which looked like blue skies all the way after the turmoil that had followed the break-up of the world monetary system in the late Sixties and early Seventies? Days lost through strikes in Britain fell markedly and economic growth motored ahead in the first quarter at a staggering 5.3 per cent compared with the last quarter of 1972.
To put that in context, quarter-on-quarter growth the same time a year earlier had been 0.2 per cent, and the year before that minus 0.9 per cent. In 1970, first quarter growth compared with the previous quarter had been minus 0.8 per cent.
In retrospect, 1973 was a fool's paradise in which a gigantic economic stimulus delivered by western governments - sound familiar? - had put us all on steroids. In this climate, even white-ruled Rhodesia, target of allegedly-tough international sanctions, clocked up impressive growth rates.
What we didn't then call a 'black swan event' or an 'unknown unknown' - the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war - capsized this short-lived recovery. A good thing there are no comparable international flashpoints today. Apart from North and South Korea. Oh, and Egypt. Um, yeah and Syria. And Iran. And...
While we're talking about years, the Peel quote is from 1968, the sleeve notes for the first Tyrannosaurus Rex album. But then, you knew that.
1) His name is...
I'VE only just caught up with Half Moon Street, a thriller starring Michael Caine and Sigourney Weaver. It's been sitting on my DVD pile for yonks but I'd always sort-of assumed the title was supposed to conjure up vague images of Chinatown, whether in London, New York or anywhere else.
Without being too PC, I get a little tired of all this 'hello, grasshopper' stuff - I found the Michael Cimino film Year of the Dragon really rather...I won't say 'offensive', but you feel free.
Anyway, it turned out that I could not have been more wrong. Not only is Half Moon Street not in some real or fictional Chinese quarter, not only is it a real street running off Piccadilly in London, but it is one I know well. In the days when I had acccess to the middle-class fairy gold of an expense account, I would sometimes lunch contacts at the Boudin Blanc in Mayfair, and Half Moon Street was on my way.
The film was made and set in 1986, which puts it at a turning point in British social and economic history. Thus the grotty Ladbroke Grove bedsit in which lives Weaver (an American academic holding down a poorly paid think-tank job in the Smoke) clearly belongs to the grim late Seventies and early Eighties, whereas the car-phone belonging to Caine (a British peer involved in Middle East peace talks) and the general consumer gadgetry tells of the affluent decades to come, that would last right up to the 2007-2008 crisis..
In some ways it isn't really a very good film. Weaver's pay is so lousy that she responds to a video sent by - whom? - detailing the earnings available to an escort girl. She embarks on this parallel career, hence meets Caine. On her first 'date' (with another client) she wipes off make-up before leaving her flat, apparently determined to 'be herself'.
You can't help thinking the pass has already been sold in terms of not doing things 'just to please men'.
Furthermore, she speaks in that manner peculiar to grand or highly educated (or both) American women, where most of the vowels come out as a U. Thus we hear sentences such as: 'Muny mun wunt sux without strungs.'
Well, indeed.
It is redeemed, in a way, when the bad guy (whom she thought a friend) tells her he and his confederates sent the video and that, had she not responded, it would not have mattered: 'London is full of girls like you.'
Of course, the scriptwriter could have meant simply that lots of women in the capital would be happy to work as escorts. I prefer to think he or she meant that London is full of middle-class professional women who think they can do escort work without being affected by it - a sad delusion, I'd have thought.
2) You've got to laugh
APRIL Fool's Day, as with Christmas, seems to be getting earlier every year, indeed to have drifted into the previous year. Yesterday's edition of The World at One on Radio Four ended with an hilarious spoof of an earnest discussion about yoof culture. The peg for this piece of comic brilliance was, apparently, the fact that London's South Bank Centre will this weekend be transformed into 'a concrete playground, a celebration of street culture', according to the BBC, although this may have been another part of the spoof. You can listen here - go right to the end of the programme, it's the last item. And it is a spoof, isn't it?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b037jn8j
Thanks for reading and enjoy the weekend.
dan.atkinson@live.co.uk
Going South: Why Britain Will Have A Third World Economy By 2014, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Palgrave Macmillan