What I’m lacking, really, is any sense of the parameters. As I understand it, a best-case scenario involves the Greeks doing what they’re told. Everybody else tightens their belts a bit and there’s a bout of quite dispiriting inflation, followed by the ejection of a couple of countries from the euro, the slow retrenchment of almost every European public sector, the fundamental restructuring of industry here and in America, and a slow, slogging march back to stability and prosperity so that, in a decade or two, we can do it all again. Yes? Is that about right? So what’s the opposite? What’s the worst-case scenario? What happens when it all goes wrong?
I haven’t a clue. Nobody is saying. Is it like the above, but just slightly worse? Or is it, you know, taking-wheelbarrows-of-cash-down-to-Budgens-to-buy-a-loaf-of-bread territory? In the evenings, will the streetlights still come on? Will the streets be dark or, in fact, never dark, due to the roaming armed gangs and burning cars? Come Christmas 2013, I suppose my question essentially is, are we going to be eating a slightly smaller turkey, or some kid from down the road? I feel I should have some sense of this, and I have none at all. My sense of perspective is not so much off as absent.
‘No one should think that a further half-century of peace and prosperity is assured. It isn’t,’ said Angela Merkel the other day. My problem with this is not simply that it sounded quite threatening, because Merkel is a middle-aged lady from East Germany and thus probably cannot help sounding quite threatening even if she’s just quite sweetly ordering another cheese course. No. It was that I didn’t have a clue what she meant. War? Why? Where? Who, in her bleak vision of the future, was to attack whom?
I’ve been going through the options. Is Germany going to invade Greece and Italy to force them to raise taxes and cut their pension ages? Weirdest war ever. Or are mass-unemployed southern Europeans going to band together and invade the still relatively prosperous north? On their Vespas? From their mums’ houses? In some manner which means they only have to attack for eight hours a day, and still get three hours off for lunch and a nap? If they had the gumption for that, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Or is it the Chinese she’s worried about, who might decide that, seeing as they now own Europe, they might as well live in it, and embark upon a Europe-wide version of the Highland clearances? I’m quite prepared to be scared, Angela. Really I am. I just need a little more clarity about what I ought to be scared of.
When I think of economic meltdown, in my mind’s eye, I always end up on Frogstar B. This was the planet in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which fell into desolation after passing the Shoe Event Horizon, the point after which it is no longer economically viable to run any business other than a shoe-shop. Most of the population have fled or died, but a small minority have mutated into giant morose birds, too depressed to walk upon this scorched, cursed earth ever again. Iceland is probably like that now.
Probably it won’t be dramatic. Something primal tells us the apocalypse ought to be, but maybe these things leak, rather than burst. I interviewed a bunch of environmental activists from Plane Stupid once, and they all believed, genuinely, they had four years to save the world. ‘What are you going to do after that?’ I said. None of them had given it any thought. Because even if the world is ending, one way or another, then you’ve still got to plod along. But what will we be plodding through? Obviously it’s bad, but how bad is bad?
•••
Help me out. Did Halloween happen rather more than usual this year? I really don’t know. It might just be that I moved house. A year ago we lived in Camden, where our doorbell rang only once on that haunted eve, and our only trick-or-treaters were three sullen teenagers in hockey masks. This year we’re in Crouch End, and there were swarms of them, jostling their way up our street. My wife sent me a panicked text as I was on my way home. The fun-sized Mars bars were running out, she said, and still they came, wave after wave. Like Zulu, but with seven-year-olds in witch hats.
All of this is fine by me, American-influenced or not. What I mind, as I may have mentioned before, is the decline of the turnip. Honestly. Pumpkin lanterns my arse. When I was a child, in Edinburgh, it was turnips or nothing. The Southeast, I gather, has been pumpkin-dominated since the 1970s, to the extent that even people my age often simply refuse to believe that a turnip lantern was ever a thing. But it was. It’s the real thing. They weren’t easy to carve; they took hours of sweat and vigorous hacking. Sometimes, the hollow inside would pool with your innocent childhood blood. Next year, any child without one is getting nothing from me. Or only raisins, which is about as bad.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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