To travel in hope?

Daily Torygraph?

I have a cautionary tale of superstition and poor decision making that will live long in the family memory bank and I shall probably regret for many years to come. Secondly I made the mistake of reading the Daily Telegraph online and found it pushing up my blood pressure. This is a shame because I used to read it when I was a lad because my Dad took it on a daily basis. I have to say that the sports coverage is excellent. That was my Dad's story and certainly mine too. I didn't used to find the headlines making me cross when I was younger however and yesterday I had to come away from the website for just that reason. These two events of which I shall describe have a connection that I shall endeavor to link for you.

I recently travelled south to see my dear mother and had my daughter in tow. Well she wasn't being towed as that would be dangerous, she was sat next to me all the way down but  you get my drift. I have a love/hate relationship with my car. I love to hate it. it has let me down without warning on several expensive occasions. It is the second car to do so. I used to own a Vauxhall Astra some years ago and it had a design flaw. The ignition coil would

Vauxhall Astra

randomly fail and it would mean your engine would cut out and you would glide to an ignominious halt soon after. Not fun when you are careering along the M27 at 80 mph and have to cut across three lanes of traffic in a decelerating vehicle. But this is what it did. Twice. I have owned many cars in between and those scary moments have been the only  time a car has let me down without either my direct input or omission of needed activity (service, repairs, fuel etc). Until I owned this Renault Laguna. In the first two and a half years of ownership it broke down tragically on three occasions and the engineers just shrugged and said " It happens!"

Well this time the fault was wholly mine. I could mutter about gas station nozzle design but the plain matter of fact is that unleaded petrol comes from a bright green hose and diesel from a black one. I am not colour blind and topped my diesel tank with 25 litres of best unleaded. And only realised when I tried to pay. We shall gloss over the inpatient driver who shouted abuse at my daughter because I hadn't left the vicinity of the pump within seconds of replacing my fuel cap. So first poor decision - picking up the wrong nozzle. 

A straw pole of my Mum`s contacts in her art class the next day suggested this is a common occurrence, however it just puts me at the same level as an octogenarian! The second mistake was to take the advice of the petrol station  attendant who said just fill the tank up and burn the lot off. I had a long journey to complete and was already running behind schedule so this ploy had attraction. 

All seemed well at first and we raced down as far as Sheffield with my trip computer telling me I was doing an unbelievably good economy rate. Third poor decision was to stop for food at Woodhall Services on the M1. The services themselves are actually excellent but that was where the car stayed for the next 4 hours.

It cost me £250 to correct and a three hour wait for the specialist van to come and drain my tank. I then still had to put in some more fuel to complete my journey. My Daughter then explained to me that my first mistake had, in actual fact, been my refusal to salute the lone Magpie we passed moments before I pulled into the first garage that morning. I had in fact been rather rude about my daughters superstition as I am about most superstitions unless they involve sport (I will have to explain that one in a later post). I had to take the abuse in silence because the only alternative was to admit I was just an incompetent nincompoop who can`t tell green from black.

One for Sorrow!

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote "To Travel Hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is the labour" 

I am not sure my family agrees with the last part. That journey was a labour alright!

So why did the Daily Telegraph put my blood pressure up? Well it wasn't just the story in the blog I linked you to it was all the headlines that morning. Amongst some were headlines slating public sector workers and their unions but it was whole drift of the front page that just irked me. 

The reason I picked up on the blog was that the ageing population theory is not new and is a phenomenon of the developed world. And has been for many years. I first read about it in 1982 and the "demographic time bomb" as it was called was going to kick in by the year 2000. Well we have survived that so far. In a nutshell not only are we living longer we are having less children and so the average age of the population rises. The  "Time bomb" bit is that current government planning (world wide) is that the working population will pay taxes of one sort or another and this then pays for all the public services and pensions. The problem with this plan becomes that the working population is dwindling as a section as more and more people live into retirement and beyond. The article I read in 1982 reckoned 1/3 of the UK population would be over 60 by now. 

So who IS going to pay for my retirement?  

The academic in the video on the blog is apparently well respected but he also wrote a book about how the US would lose it's dominance to the EU, India and China. The video appears to state the opposite because Europe is dying. Which one is it to be? US Slayer or Zombie Nation?

The blog also makes claims about Europe's apparent slumbering economy. This is down to

the 2008 financial meltdown and the cack handed political attempt at currency union which was the Euro zone. It was a political fiddle. There were no checks and balances put in place to ensure countries (Greece, Spain, Ireland etc) didn't over extend themselves. There was no attempt to converge the economies. This is why Gordon Brown didn't let us join the Euro - although it sounded good at the time. He knew that if push came to shove the rich nations would have to bail out the poorer and that there was no way a Westminster government could prevent it. The economies that have crashed in the Euro have not been allowed to follow usual ploys for getting out of trouble - devaluation for instance. Central Euro bankers can't allow it.

Back to Emmanuel Todd. As I said earlier  he has written a book predicting the rise of Europe but here he is apparently telling us it is doomed. These two statements seem at odds and lead me to the suspicion we haven't seen the whole talk  just the bit that suited the Daily Telegraphs Europe Sceptic narrative. 

We may or may not be shackled to the corpse of Europe but the joy is in the labour. Not the arriving. As my brush with the Magpie showed me that sometimes you need a wing and a prayer