The Lair

The Freakonomics blog dissects arcana and tells us, among other things, that this whole economic thing is deceptively easy. Since everyone is a self-described economics expert these days, let me offer my anecdotal nugget of not-really-economic-wisdom.

Based on approximately the same time last year, London is doing anything between 66% and 80% worse, in an economic sense at least.

You totally didn’t see that one coming, I can tell. But here’s why …

Walking along a deserted Hounslow high street on a Saturday night (not all that late, either!), I was offered drugs by far fewer people (literally, a “pssst, mah brother. You want some [insert colloquial phrase here]“) than at the same time last year. It’s hard times when even drug dealing seems to have been affected by the credit crunch. Or maybe the druggies have moved elsewhere, I don’t know.

In other news, the number of people offering entertainment of other varieties (the so-called recreational category of pills and so on) went down from 2 to 0. Clearly, this means I have now crossed into the old-fart-probably-doesnt-have-use-for-party-drugs threshold in the last year. I sob silently for these visible signals of my advancing years.

But no – the high street is deserted early, shops are shuttered, plenty of stores are announcing gigantic clearout sales. It all looks like doom and gloom from here.