The Lair

The coffin corner is one of those concepts that I remember reading ages ago but forgot until a recent memory joggle. In this case, the jab to the memory came from a slightly sensationalist analysis of how Air France flight 447 may have been downed.

So while you are napping, eating or watching a movie on that flight to LAX, you should know the plane you are flying is cruising along at the ratty edge of its capabilities. Why? Money. The higher an airliner flies, the better gas mileage it gets.

With the slight caveat that going a bit too high can cause the airplane to do all sorts of things it shouldn’t be doing – like stalling. Actually, that is sage advice for pretty much anyone, including that dude called Icarus. But I digress. The point is, those kinds of tradeoffs are everywhere.

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For pretty much as far back as I can remember; whenever something wasn’t going too well with the country – someone would always pipe up and say “but look, there is a war on. We can’t be expected to fight an insurgency and do things that make economic sense at the same time”. And this was completely true. This type of war doesn’t make economic sense anyway (OTOH, if we invaded the Maldives and got into a war there, now that may have made some sort of economic sense).

But so it goes.

In the past 20 odd years (really, the mid/late 80s didn’t count too much – economic liberalization really started trickling down in the early 90s), we were the subject of many casual conversations and head scratching by economic types. Usually, you see, other countries with this sort of debilitating civil war tend to do a lot worse than we did. Oh, which isn’t to say that we had it all good – but the relative isolation of fighting to a section of the island (with only the occasional spillover) meant that economic activity could continue.

But there was always this shrug of the shoulders and “Yeah, we’re fighting a war” as an excuse to not even pretend at bridging the deficit, make populist subsidies and the like. How many times has the war been the single biggest electoral issue? I think the last time it wasn’t a serious issue was in 1990/1991.

Which brings me to my main point – there are no more excuses.

In the space of 12-14 months (yeah, I know the offensive started earlier – but May 2008 is as good a point as any), we have been transformed from a case of economic curiosity into yet another common or garden mismanaged third world economy. One with a massive budget deficit, a crushing amount of public debt and a horrifying trade imbalance. And we still have one of the largest cabinets in the world. I don’t mean the sort that you store ornamental porcelain in either.

And I guess everyone thought the hard part is over.

It seems not. I go into the local Aldi when I land and even the shelf configuration is almost exactly as I recall from last year. Never mind that I shopped in a supermarket nearly 300 miles away – within a few minutes, I was on shopping autopilot – throwing things into the cart without even thinking about it too much.

Something I try to do in a new and strange town if I have time – intentionally get lost. Given that my sense of direction is all sorts of weird, this isn’t difficult. What happens next is a walk of a few hours while I try to remember place names and street names and find my way home.

Sometimes this works. Of course, it is cheating to consult strangers or hop into taxis. Given that the town I’m in is smaller than York, navigation wasn’t too difficult. A castle looming in the hillside above the town also helps.

Now, if only the town wasn’t inhabited by chavvish teens after dark…