- There's no denying it. We're squashed. In fact we must be some of the most
squashed people on earth.
- My wife likes to make the point that she comes from a place a good deal
less squashed... Canada. In fact, it's positively unsquashed for the most
part. Her province alone is the size of western Europe she reminds me. To
which I counter sarcastically (for it is not a new observation in our
house), yes but how many of us want to add to the burdens of our daily round
by relocating to the Arctic Circle? Then there's the rejoinder - if I'm
really striving to quell the insurrection - that why do most Canucks choose
to live within 100 miles of the US border.
- Not that I wish to bring you, dear reader, our ongoing domestic dialogue
as to optimum lifestyle options. It's more about traffic. Everyone in the UK
moans about it but everyone's got a car...at least one. Each year the
traffic gets worse...each year people want a new car...or another one...a
bigger one...a faster one. But what's the point we're near enough gridlocked
as it is?
Your super duper 'S' type model may charge from 0-60 in 5 seconds flat but
its less than useless if your average urban crawl is slower than in the days
of the horse and carriage. So we throw our hands up at the congealed mess of
snarling earth warming fumes and frayed tempers.
It can't go on...do something...someone!
- Well in this town, someone did...the mayor of London.
Four years ago political pariah "Red Ken" Livingstone – so called for his
left wing political views - introduced a vehicle congestion charge to an
area encompassing the core of London with the City financial district at its
heart. Originally £5 per day (approx.
$10) when introduced in 2003 it was increased to £8
($15) two years later with more draconian threats in the offing for carbon
toting 4x4 drivers, so-called "Chelsea tractors".
- The director of congestion charging in London, Malcolm Murray-Clark, says
70,000 fewer vehicles a day now come into the zone. This amounts to a 20%
cut in traffic and consequently sweeter air. As another tax, it's a nice
little earner too generating £122m last year which is recycled into public
transport, additional cycle lanes etc. As such public transport is on the
increase as are bicycles. Indeed, there has been a 72% increase in the
number of cyclists on London's major roads since 2000. Extrapolate the trend
and London could one day rival Beijing for cyclists and maybe Beijing, with
its new found love of the motor car, rival London for clogged roads and
seething traffic jams.
- This week the zone got bigger. It more than doubled by extending to cover
the West End too. It now includes the reluctant boroughs of Westminster and
Kensington & Chelsea – home to some of the most expensive real estate in the
UK.
- Traffic problems are little better on a national level as our crowded
island looks at road pricing to help ease congestion. Satellite technology
is proposed to monitor driving from a little black box placed in the car.
Journey prices to start from 2p a mile says a BBC report. An estimated 1.5m
respondents petitioned Tony Blair in protest.
*** At some point people are going to start noticing oil's over $60 again
and gold's leapt to $685. What's going on? Iran, primarily. Iran's nuclear
ambitions defying the UN. US aircraft carriers duly steamed into the Gulf
this week amidst talk of a "surgical strike".
Also, new data showed falling US petrol inventories as heating fuel demand
remains strong in the face of cold weather. The FT reports today too, a
three year delay in the development of a giant new oilfield in Kazakhstan.
A big deal given its the largest discovery in more than 30 years.
Not that this news has disturbed the buoyant mood prevailing in global stock
markets. The S&P 500 is within "a few percentage points of recapturing its
all time highs", reports Richard Beales in the FT. Though there's plenty of
room for pessimism "the price-to-earnings ratio of the S&P 500 has been
hovering below 18 times. That is hardly excessive by historical standards,
and means price gains so far mostly reflect rising profits, not inflated
optimism about the future."
*** The Japanese Central bank doubled interest rates this week when it
raised from 0.25% to 0.5%. Nothing much to write home about yet as the Yen
slide to another record low against the Euro but warning shot for the
countless billions plying the Yen carry trade – borrowing in Yen and buying
higher yielding assets in other countries. After five years of zero interest
rates though, the deflation period is now over and its flipside, inflation,
is makign a reappearance. The Japanese stock market responded positively to
the news and closed the week at 18,188, a seven year high.
*** Finally, a job that seems to rival football managers for rapid turnover,
the role of Italian Prime Minister.
We can't seem to get rid of ours in Britain, the Italians can't seem to hold
on to theirs. Romano Prodi is quitting after just nine months in the job
leaving the problem of tackling one of the highest debts in the western
world,
108% of GDP, to another.
Have a great week-end.
Robin Mackrill
The Daily Reckoning
THE SUNDAY RECKONING: Sermon Lent I 2007 with the Rev'd Dr Peter Mullen,
Chaplain to the stock exchange
So again we are at the start of Lent. How should we keep this season? What
should we do? Well, don't be seduced by the newspapers and magazines which,
if they refer to Lent at all, make it the opportunity for going on a diet.
So that you'll look nice and trim for your holiday – on some godforsaken
celebrity sand dunes. Do not confuse dieting with fasting. The diet is just
another aspect of the generalised self-obsession, and pampering me-ism that
now passes for spirituality almost everywhere. Fasting is different. It's
not that chocolates or beer or sticky puddings are bad things.
But fasting is a demonstration of the truth that even good things, even the
best things, should be set aside for a while to help us concentrate on God.
This is the whole point of Lent. It is to be used to help us draw nearer to
God. Traditionally, this is the season of Give up and take up. Give up a
pleasure and take up a devotion. There's lots you can do easily.
Come to one of the weekday Masses on Wednesday or Friday. Come to the Monday
evening Devotions session.
Look in your Prayer Book at the Psalms and you will see that at the top of
every page it tells you which Psalms are set for which days. Say them
morning and evening and in a month you've read the whole of them – some of
the most powerful and helpful poetry ever written. It needn't even take up
much extra time – you can read them in the bath or on the loo.
But Lent asks some basic questions. What do we mean by drawing closer to
God? And why should we want to do this? Because being near God is all
delight. It is what we are here on earth for. God is our origin and our
destiny. In his beautiful prayer St Augustine said, O Lord, thou hast made
us for thyself; and our hearts are restless till they rest in thee.
And the thing about giving yourself to God is that you don't lose anything:
you get yourself back – yourself clarified and enlarged. Once you start to
give yourself away – to give yourself to God – you become who you really
are. In God's wacky spiritual economy, the more you give yourself to him the
more you you become. It is a shift in perspective. We are used to going
round with self-consciousness. What we need to develop instead is
God-consciousness.
Put your mind on to God and give your heart to him, and that way you will
avoid being strangled by introspection. We all have this little person in
our head. We all talk to it a lot of the time. It's talking to yourself.
It's putting self-awareness at the centre of life. Wrong from the start. The
aim is to shift this psychological-spiritual orientation so that we feel the
reality of God at our centre.
But we quite like ourselves, don't we? Why should we want to get rid of
self-consciousness – that constant awareness of sweet little me? Because in
fact it's not that sweet. Self-consciousness easily generates into
self-obsession. At its best self-consciousness is a jabbering in the head;
it's a worry; it's an endless self-assessment. Mankind is always tempted to
put himself at the centre. And for the last century – since Sigmund Freud
and psychoanalysis – we have been taught that this perpetual inward gaze is
what we should be doing. It isn't. That man ought to be known as Sigmund
Fraud.
Think about something else. Look outwards. Why do you think creativity is so
admired and desired? Because it is a high grade way of taking yourself out
of yourself and putting yourself into something else. The escape into
creativity. Only it's not an escape – it's making a gift of yourself. It's
what God did when he made the world. And creativity should not be understood
only as the business of high art. Any movement outwards, away from the
soliloquising self, is an act of creativity.
Not just The B-minor Mass but Who sweeps a room as for thy laws makes that
and the action fine.
This thing about drawing nearer to God. It's because God is lovely. He's not
the schoolmaster or the VAT man. He's not sitting up there judging you,
adding up your vices and virtues. The language about judgment and hell is
simply a description of life without God at the centre. God doesn't send us
to hell. But unless we are centred in him, we are in hell already. God
doesn't want that.
What does God want? He wants to show us his love. He wants to fill our
hearts and minds with his love. He is full of love, overflowing. You know
from human relationships that unsurpassable joy – even if it is fleeting –
of being in love, of loving and knowing you are loved in turn. This is how
it should be between us and God. And not fleeting, but forever. God is in
love with us and he invites us into a love affair with him.
There is nothing Schmaltzy about this. It's not sentimental. For the way we
love God is through our will. We love God by obeying him and serving him.
And not, as William Blake thought, because God is the Great Nobodaddy aloft
farting and belching and coughing. Not because God sternly demands our
obedience. But because obedience to God is the whole meaning and purpose of
our existence and all our happiness. That's what blessed means in The Sermon
on the Mount. Your blessedness, your happiness, your good – that's what God
wants.
As I said, it's not sentimental. It's personal. And it's more than personal.
For just as a man can destroy himself through sin, so a whole society and
nation can be destroyed if it turns away from God. Our society faces
destruction – I'd better say that again, you might think it was a slip of
the tongue – our society faces destruction from two directions: our own
internal decadence and the ambitions of a rival culture which is
aggressively confident and committed to promoting its way of life. I'm not
talking only about so called terrorism. The ordinary devout Muslim despises
us for the way we have turned from our faith and followed a decadent and
trivial way of life.
It is not too late. Just as each individual man can be saved from his sins
by the Lord Jesus Christ, so a people and nation can be restored if it
returns to God.
But we have to wonder if the corporate will exists. We shall not be saved by
the hedonistic consumer culture of celebs. We shall not be saved by
sentimentality and chestnuts roasting by the open fire. We shall not be
saved by the Last Night of the Proms – or even by Harrison Birtwistle and
Damien Hirst.
We shall not be saved by high art and by the supposed cultural treasures of
our heritage. Man does not live by museums and art galleries alone but by
every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. For our intellectual and
artistic achievements are at bottom the product of Christian civilisation.
If we let Christianity go, the lot goes and us with it. Or as T.S. Eliot put
it more eloquently: Such achievements as you can boast of in the way of
polite society will hardly survive the faith to which they owe their
significance.
So what's the answer? It's simple and plain. We must actually believe the
Christian Creeds. We must pray. We must receive the Blessed Sacrament. We
must centre ourselves on the truths of God. In a word we must return to him.
We must do this here in our church of St Michael. In our homes, our places
of work. And we must let the whole nation know what is at stake – not in
some apocalyptic future, but here and now. Tell them all what the score is.
Turn ye then, and ye shall live. Although we have sinned, we have an
Advocate with the father, Jesus Christ the righteous and he is the
propitiation for our sins.
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