Regular readers will have noticed a lack of posts for the last few weeks. This is because I have been away and only returned in the early hours of January the 9th. Where have I been? on holiday in Tunisia. Yes, I decided to get away from all of the hustle and bustle of the festivities, the endless turkey sandwiches and the copious amounts of dishwashing for two glorious weeks in the sunshine. How did it go you may ask? Well enough to give me sufficient material for 4 maybe 5 posts in the travel section of this blog with oodles of photos. Needless to say Christmas day was spent lounging around the hotel pool with several Gin and Tonics. New years Eve saw me diving into the pool on the stroke of midnight and running around the beach stark naked at 2am but that is another story!
What have I come back to? Well the first shock is the weather. The second is a mountain of junk mail and a cat that no longer recognises me and is so fickle he has turned his attentions to Roger Moor and his family. Indeed it is going to take a few days to remind Genghis that this is my house not his and that the bed belongs to me and not him. I feel better than I have done in a long time and the winter blues have for the moment at least melted away. The news papers tell a different story though and little seems to have changed since I left. The world is not a brighter place and seems hell bent on destruction. Israel, rightly or wrongly, appears to filling out the prophecies of Neville Shutes’ novel “On The Beach “. It can surely only be a matter of time before other nations decide to take sides and act accordingly. The UN seems impotent to send in troops and stop the slaughter and retaliation on both sides.
The economy is still in freefall and the Daily Mail displayed only yesterday the headline “Let’s print more money”. This would suggest that the government no longer has enough assets, liquid or fixed to cover its debts. It all seems a far cry from the Gold Standard many nations used as a basis for printing money between the late 19th century and the early 20th century. In short what this meant was that each nation had to have enough gold to cover the amount of money it had in circulation. To the man in the street this equates to having assets or savings to at least the value of what you owe. When the day comes that you owe more than you are worth, have no means of obtaining any more and your creditors ask for their money back then you become bankrupt. Governments however can simply print more money but you only have to look at Zimbabwe to see what happens when you do. To compare it would be like you or me attempting to pay our Visa card bills with bottle tops. Foreign countries will simply stop accepting payments in sterling because the notes are worthless. It is a simply ludicrous situation for our government to be in.
It merely remains for me to hope that things get better in the coming 12 months and to wish everyone a very happy new year 2009.