This is a time for making the most of small mercies. One of the greatest of these, as the financial system collapses around us, is the splendid joke that is Robert Peston of the BBC.
His extraordinarily camp, over-emphatic delivery would be perfect for reporting glitzy Broadway first nights but seems hilariously at odds with worldwide economic catastrophe. Peston has all the glee of the callow cub reporter rejoicing in the size of his scoop while lacking the imagination to understand the anxiety his excitable tales of doom-and-gloom might be causing others.
Like poor Mr and Mrs Spencer of Claygate, Surrey, for instance, who somehow managed to commit themselves to £40,000 worth of home improvements (double glazing and a new kitchen) just before the current crisis went big time. As I do my lengths at the swimming pool, I sometimes experience a knot of fear forming in my guts. Mercifully, thinking of Peston, an egregious character both Jane Austen and P.G. Wodehouse would have been proud to have invented, makes me laugh and my panic disperses.
And Mrs Spencer might have left home without the new kitchen. The current one has been unaltered since the Seventies, the stripped pine doors are falling off their hinges, the top oven doesn’t work, the Formica surfaces are indelibly stained with the remembrance of curries past, and the waste pipe leaks. As for the double glazing, surely the most boring possible item of household expenditure, one has little choice when the existing wooden frames are so rotten that there is a danger that the glass could fall out in the slightest breeze.
What is unforgivable, however, is my reckless expenditure on Amazon, the online mail order service that makes buying books and CDs so appallingly easy.
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