Sometimes it is by catching ourselves unawares that we see ourselves best. That unprepossessing fellow with a dull, crumpled, peasant face and a faintly disobliged expression that you caught a glimpse of in the shop window while Christmas shopping on Oxford Street — oh crikey, that was you.
Our looks, however, are not our fault. Our attitudes are surely under our control. Or are they? the other day I caught myself, as if in a shop window, in an attitude I’d never acknowledged, do not like, and do not seem to be able to do anything about. And now I’ve spotted it, and the more I think about it and look out for it in others, the more prevalent it seems to be. It may even be at the root of those global economic problems with which 2011 ends and 2012 begins.
I caught my heart lifting at bad economic news on the radio.
It was around 7.30 on a grey December morning and I was lying in bed with only half an ear to the Today programme. A business news announcer came on. He said the Pacific markets had reacted badly to something or other overnight. He said all eyes would be on the FTSE 100, the CAC and the Drax when they opened, and that they had closed the day before lower than they had started it.
‘Aha,’ I noticed myself thinking, now alert and with full attention to the radio report, ‘I must remember to check at nine o’clock to see how things are going.’ And why? This was when I caught myself, momentarily unawares.
I could not deny it. There was no doubt about it. I wanted the financial news to be bad. I glimpsed in my unsupervised response the same glee I’d felt on hearing that house prices across Britain were still falling; the same small inward smile I’d noticed on hearing that the yields on Italian and Spanish bonds were approaching the ‘psychologically ominous’ 7 per cent mark.
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