Panic

I've been over to Stafford today, to visit my mother, and I always fill up with diesel when I'm there, as it is anything up to 7p per litre cheaper than it is at home, a difference in price I find it hard to justify. So I refute any allegation that I was "panic-buying" in response to some ill-advised ministerial statements (or, maybe, a bit of political sh*t stirring by a government feeling under pressure from the bad press the budget "granny tax" and the latest "cash for favours" story have brought them); I'd have been there anyway, I insist! But of course all the people queuing up with me will have been panic buying!

How helpless we are without our machines and the fuel to run them! Modern society comes across as so in control, so self-assured, so sorted. We're well and happy, aren't we, and so secure? Or might it all be a house of cards? That urge to panic is never far below the surface. We keep telling ourselves how safe and secure we are, but that worm of disbelief is always gnawing away within us.

We find ourselves thinking, "Surely this is all too good to be true?" Well, I hope we do, at least sometimes, anyway, because it is. I'm told that we need three planet earths to sustain the standard of living expected in Western Europe, five planet earths to support the people of the USA in the style to which they've become accustomed. That's how unsafe we are; that's how unreal the world we're living in is. Well, we have committed ourselves to sorting out the country's finances, or so our politicians assure us. They have a plan, they say, and it's already working. And yet, the sad truth is that for the foreseeable future, however far ahead we look, we'll still be borrowing, just to keep afloat.

And - while we do our best to hold the panic and desperation at bay - where most of us are (me too, if I'm honest) is that we want to see it all sorted out, glad to see some tough decisions and hard line policies, supportive of cuts - just so long as it all happens somewhere else and to someone else and doesn't really hurt me. In other words, not in the real world; someone else can have that.