Financial Crisis -- latest

This is exactly what it must feel like to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

For much of yesterday, the world seemed to be bumping along on the bottom. One was reminded of the old story of the gambler who came happily home from the track to report that he had broken even – “A good thing, too; I really needed the money.”

No such luck. That wasn’t the bottom at all.

Like you, Barbara (comment yesterday), I’ve got plenty of stash to see me out. (I photographed it all for Ravelry when I first joined; I'm Tayside00; you can look. There have been additions since then, but nothing, I think, very substantial.) But I had the kind of panicky feeling one gets, this morning, that maybe I should order the yarn for Ketki’s sweater today, and some of Sharon’s gossamer CashSilk for the Wedding Ring Shawl, while my credit card still works, just to be sure I have something to take with me into the forest.

Ketki’s sweater could easily be done from Shetland jumper-weight stash, but I love Araucania and I think it would make a wonderfully comfortable and durable Fair Isle sweater, and I’d like to try.

You’re right, Mary Lou, about the seriously calming effect of knitting. I’m glad to have a medical word for how it works. I have been completely transformed from a miserable sweaty wreck when required to fly, into an intrepid birdman, by the simple expedient of taking sock-knitting along. I first did it when we flew to the US for my mother’s 90th birthday, therefore 12 years ago almost exactly. The change in me has been astonishing, and the resulting socks are much appreciated far and wide.

I might as well mention here that I’ve reached row 29 of the 8th repeat of the Princess centre. Might finish it by Sunday night?

The Iceland story continues to astonish. Hundreds of local authorities (not “several”, as I said yesterday), in Scotland as well as England, kept their spare money in Icelandic banks. So many that one suspects a common source of advice. Someone on the radio last night while I was doing the washing up, seemed to suggest that it might have been advice circulated by the Treasury itself.

Our Prime Minister says it is “illegal” for Iceland to freeze all those millions of pounds, and responded yesterday by freezing Icelandic assets in Britain, under legislation designed to inconvenience terrorists. It shows, if showing were needed, that you have to be careful about voting emergency powers to governments. They’ll be used in ways you don’t expect.

There’s one piece of really good news this morning – Evelyn Waugh would have loved it. There is a plan afoot – this is perfectly serious – to distribute mobile telephone/cameras in substantial numbers to the Afghani population so that they can make little films of happy scenes and distribute them to each other and post them on the Internet and thus counter Taliban propaganda. The Taliban apparently circulate pictures of corpses left behind after American and British air strikes and it has an unsettling effect.