Dawn

Dawn

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

I had to buy a new chip for my UK phone as the last one had died for lack of use. Since then – 7 days ago – I've received about 15 messages from O2 telling me to call some number or other. Today's started – Hi, It's Toby, the O2 Guru. Hope you and your phone are best buddies now. We Gurus are here to offer clear, friendly advice, and handy tips and tricks on line and in O2 shops. There was more but I couldn't go on. Still it wasn't all bad news; I confirmed that my phone is vomit-proof.

Walking through my mother's lounge yesterday morning, I noticed that the Papal Mass was on the TV. Possibly because I've been reading about Julius Caesar in a book on Shakespeare – and possibly because the predominant colour was purple - it struck me that the event resembled nothing so much as the crowning of a Roman Emperor. Insofar as I can imagine what this involved. And then there was the Roman backcloth. I wonder if Frankie 1 will also have a slave walking behind him, to whisper in his ear a regular reminder that he's mortal.

Then I got thinking about Holy Relics. These are things like bits of bone of St This and the ear of St That. And about five million pieces of the True Cross. The stimulus was someone talking about St Joseph teaching Jesus the craft of carpentry. And I thought – If good money is paid for bits of the Cross, etc., there must be a fortune to be made selling cabinets and the like made by Jesus. So, where are they all? Frankly, it's a mystery to me. Maybe Jesus failed to incorporate a symbol or even his initials on his stuff. Or maybe he was a poor carpenter and everything fell apart. I guess we'll never know. At least not until we get to Heaven and have a chance to ask him.

Going through a box of my father's stuff today, I happened upon Part 1 of Beginners Welsh. His grandfather had been Welsh but this wasn't the reason for studying the language. My father was a representative for Black & White whisky in a territory which included North Wales. Not surprisingly, he'd written in the front of the booklet Wyn Du a Gwyn. Which Trevor will confirm is Welsh for “Black & White Rep.” Possibly. For those who don't know, Welsh is the Gaelic language of the original Brits, or at least those who were pushed back into Wales and Cornwall by the advancing Anglo-Saxon hordes from Frisia and North Germany. Apart from Cornish, it's related to the languages of Ireland and Scotland and is close to that of Brittany in France, which was settled by folk from Cornwall. And it looks bloody difficult, even if the kids in Wales do speak it. The booklet is an eye-opener as it makes no concessions to modern teaching methods and, although it looks like it came out of Dickens, it was first published in 1934 and my father's edition was dated 1959. Despite that, one of the first English sentences to translate is “Where art thou going?” For a flavour of the vocabulary, I give you CERDDED, GWEITHIO, CHWARAE and BWRDD. You will have noticed that the last one contains no vowels. So, closer to Polish than English. As it happens, I'll be seeing a Welsh-speaking friend in London next week and will be able to practice my new skills with him. Or I could if he hadn't told me last year he hates the language. But I may have misunderstood him, as he said it in Welsh.

The EU: Cyprus: A view I have no difficulty believing . . .

There is one great beneficiary from all this – the Germans. Die Welt reports that the rush of investors to buy German government bonds had brought Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble an interest rate saving of at least €15 billion. This is because the federal government has to refinance annually about one-fifth of its debt €1.3 trillion debt mountain each year by issuing new securities. Servicing the interest cost around €30 billion. But for the crisis, though, this sum would be even higher. And, according to calculations by the Kiel Institute for World Economics (IfW), this so-called "safe-haven" effect will get stronger as the eurocrisis persists. By 2023, the federal government will have saved about €80 billion, from reduced interest, compared with pre-2009 levels, when the crisis started.

Effectively, this is a massive "own goal" in the part of the eurozone as, in one fell swoop, the "colleagues" have destroyed will little vestigial trust there is in the banking system. You can not blame any Spaniard, if he puts his money s under the mattress, says Die Welt. And thus is exacerbated the banking crisis.

Putting the whole affair in perspective is Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which talks of the destruction of trust. "For euro-based investors, there is no more security for their savings", the paper says.

Pointing out that Cyprus has a minute economy, smaller than the Saarland, and that the "colleagues" are claiming there is no systemic risk to the eurozone, where central bank balance sheets fall in the trillion range, it questions why such dramatic action has been over a loan of €10 billion, the amount being advanced to Cyprus.

So many things simply do not stack up that that the ECB is seen to be stoking up fear of contagion – especially as Greek savers are heavily exposed. This does not touch the banks or deal with the underlying problems. It is a tax on wealth.

Thus does Die Zeit believe that we have reached a new stage in the eurocrisis.  The rescue has turned into a "nail-biter". No one is now prepared to predict what will happen next.


And on that worrying note, I'll leave you. It's all rather like Gary Linneker's view of World Cup football – Everyone plays ninety minutes of football now and again. And then the Germans win. Though it did sound rather better ten years ago. But you know what I mean.

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