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.