Social Economics

I am absolutely sure I am using the term 'Social Economics' wrongly. Then again, I am not an economist or a real socialist for that matter. However, I probably know as much about economics as those who profess to by the state in which we find ourselves.

Recently, I blogged on National Debt being the new sub-prime but in the heart of that piece was the idea that external markets are watching our economy closely with a keen view to see how we can tackle our budget deficit and therefore be able to pay our debts. Given much of our National Debt is being subsidised by Quantitative Easing (QE) money to the tune of £200bn, soon it will go back on the open market and we will see what the real world, with real money, thinks of our ability to service our debt. There are many who now believe that as we leave a cogent strategy to tackle our debt until after the election and have built our strategy to date on using new money which we don't have to support ourselves, that Britain is in a precarious state.

It was described by an editor for the FT the other night as a period where a boy scout is trying to light a fire - the QE money is the firelighter which is burning brightly but there is little evidence that it has lit the fire that will be our economic recovery. But I would argue there is far more at stake here.

In my idea of 'Social Economics' which has nothing to do with its real definition, our future relies on two aspects which are not classical economics. 1) Politics - we are in a period of hiatus, marked by our lack of enthusiasm to actually do anything about the budget deficit, not even a spending review in preparation which is due to the imminent General Election. This may be understandable as cost cutting is not popular and it seems that inaction is as voters have actually polled in favour of the Government in recent months. Perhaps it is 'Denial', my age old theme - put your head in the sand and the problem will somehow right itself. Gordon Brown may be foolish to start believing in free market economics at the wrong time, especially as he believes it's what got us into this mess. The issue here is that the longer we delay and not tackle the problem, the worse the problem gets and the cure will need to be more drastic - in both spending cuts and tax rises.

2) Hand in hand with this comes the mood of the people. We have just had a dramatic illustration of how voters can change Government policy as Iceland has refused to back its Government in paying our Government compensation for those who lost savings in Icelandic banks. I have a great deal of sympathy with the Icelandic people - while they had many good years, by the end of this year they will have lost almost a third of their take home pay due to the banking disasters, and they are not a rich people. Besides, it was our Government's decision to repay the losses to individuals, not theirs. What it means is that there is a breaking point and people will have a finite limit as to how much they believe they can pay in taxes which is fair, while the same may not apply for spending cuts as they can be far more localised or general. The clear learning point is that if there had been a referendum on the bank bailout beforehand, it is suggested we would have all voted against it.

The outside world will watch closely as to what our breaking point will be. Astutely, Lord Mandelson has understood that there is a limit that people will pay in taxes but I don't think he was referring to us but to bankers who are royally miffed about the windfall tax, on top of the announced 'super tax' on those who earn £150,000 or more plus the new curbs on City bonuses. In a microcosm what bankers do about it will illustrate a wider reaction. Let's face it, if bankers get cheesed off their employers will relocate them and they will rise again elsewhere to earn their money. For real people like you and I, we will have to pick up their share of the tax burden and the rest.

So the question arises, how much will we all tolerate in Britain? How much are we prepared to sacrifice in order to keep bankers here and London as one of the biggest and most influential of financial centres? Are we prepared, as Iceland is, to say, 'Up yours, take your Casino banking elsewhere and the fools that play it' or are we realistic enough to know that we cannot have a Britain without the support of the City, its earnings and influence?

I am sure there is a line that we all cannot cross. I am also certain that the later we leave that 'stress test' the worse it will be. I do believe that part of the attempted and almost farcical leadership coup at Labour was fuelled by the PM's inaction on the whole matter. While it is nice to talk about halving the budget deficit and talk generally about the numbers, the reality is that every voter in the country would like to know what it means before they vote. Yes, it's true we are stupid lot - we think we are still relatively prosperous and that if house prices rise again, boomtime will be back - Christmas and new year sales spending shows we are that daft. It seems we have no idea what really may happen after the election or we are just in denial that it will not deteriorate.

The reality is that after the election, when the economic mire hits the fan, there will be pressure on two sides - 1) to impress the markets that Britain is doing more than enough to reduce its budget deficit and pay its debts and 2) the people will not like the bitter medicine we will have to follow to cure us of the years of excess.

It's at that point that my 'Social Economics' will kick in. Hubris and hiatus are two funny words but we have both to contend with right now and both are all about manipulating our minds and votes. Personally, I would rather know how much all this £1.3 trillion of bailout will cost me in real terms before, not after the election, and how parties are going to give us cast iron guarantees it will not happen again.

I see nothing of it from any party right now - which means we will cast our vote once again, as at the last election over Iraq, without any of the real facts at our fingertips. Some things never change.

Denial - A Powerful Beast

I don't know how many times I have blogged on the subject of denial but it seems the theme just won't go away.

I have argued it can be a powerful mechanism used by successful business people to block out the negative issues and to focus on the positives which often is a trait of highly successful individuals. It is also, at the other extreme, the powerful force that allows psyochopaths to marginalise their crimes and live a normal life. It is the force that allows those who commit adultery under the noses of their spouses to act as if nothing is happening and even to turn the situation around and make out they are the victim not the cheated-on spouse. It is the power force that allows dictators like Col Gadaffi to welcome home convicted bombers as if they are national heroes while denying a shred of remorse for the victims of the crime. It is that powerful.

So here is a classic example of denial. In the wake of the credit crunch, the Government has urged banks to lend a great deal more to small businesses. There have been various intiatives to facilitate this, not least vast amounts of cheap loan support, Quantitative Easing (QE), underwriting of Toxic Debt, the Enterprise Loan Guarantee Scheme (ELG) and much more. Banks, meanwhile have consistently missed their lending targets, even those who are actually partially or mostly owned by us, the taxpayer. In fact, in the last quarter banks actually took back more than they lent out from businesses to the tune of over £4.5bn.

In the face of such actions, the banks claim that they are fearful of more bad debts, which may be natural. But when the ELG Scheme offers up to 75% of a loan to be guaranteed by the Government, why is so little credit being offered to small businesses?

In a classic case of denial (on many counts), Barbara Knight of the British Bankers' Association (BBA), which is a name to be played with if ever there was one, asserts with a straight face that 'demand for credit has dropped off'. It makes you wonder which planet she arrived from. She further supports the lack of regulation on bank compensation - in all aspects from salaries to guarantees, to golden hanshakes, to wholesale headhunting and extravagent bonuses linked to whatever they wish - for fear that the City will become uncompetitive and we will see top talent drain away to other centres with a more liberal view on earnings of such creatures.

This is denial at its worst or best, depending on which way you look at it. From a taxpayers point of view, the fact we have shelled out around £1.3trillion in capital, loans, guarantees and whatnot seems to have gone unnoticed. Further, our incredibly generous sums of money at rock bottom prices that we have lent to banks seems to be remaining in their strongholds when the precise purpose of our lavish philanthropy was to stimulate the economy by having all that glittering dosh used as credit to mainly small businesses.

Instead, we have banks who are not just holding onto our cheap cash but they are actually taking back more money from business - even consumers actually repaid some of the vast £1.5 trillion of collective debt for the first time since records began. In reality, banks have acted in exactly the opposite way we asked them to (and note I say asked them as there were no strings attached to the money we gave them, even for those banks we have a stake in - forward planning is not a strength of this Government, especially in a crisis).

Further, the banks have waved two fingers at us all and used most of the cash we gave them to actually invest more in the markets that failed us so badly last time around. And the bonus schemes are being tinkered with, the salaries are rising, the land-grab for 'talent' is occurring right in front of our faces at a pace that would make Usain Bolt cry.

In less than two weeks time we will have the anniversary of the fateful crash of Lehman Bros - which I read recently is what tipped us all into recession. Denial is a powerful beast because this did not trigger the recession just as sub-prime did not trigger the credit crunch - these were inevitable consequences of a fundamentally flawed financial system and they were merely manifestations of the underlying issues that everyone was systematically ignoring or denying.

Even intelligent economists as well as ministers were deluding themselves, and us, that we had never been better off and propects were at their best. The fuse was already burning, sub prime and Lehmans were merely the first of the firecracker-style explosions. They were not triggers in my analogies, they were the crisis exploding in our faces. The credit crunch was the next part of the explosion. Recession, in my mind, was going to happen anyway - it had to as the economies of the US and Britain were built on mortgage equity releases more than actual household incomes. For the first time in history, it was the perfect financial storm brewing and it was all there for everyone to see.

People like Barbara Knight, to my mind, are very dangerous. In her world, and those of the people she represents, it is perfectly acceptable to have a financial crash instigated by her members which helps drive unemployment toward 3m and to exacerbate the problem by not doing the core operation of any banking system which is lending to help stop it. In her world, it is far better to deny that her members had anything to do with it, make sure they are better looked after than before and deny that anyone is asking for credit.

In this case, along with the regulators and many of her members, many of whom advise our Government on a startegy that is patently failing, Barbara Knight needs to be replaced by people who have a sense of reality. The problems in our finacial system will not be recognised, let alone rectified, if people like Knight stay in her job. I am sure she is a very nice lady but in the grim reality of civvy street where the world looks very different, she would have lost her job for dramatic failure not as a consequence of dwindling profits - the same for the regulators and most of those whizz kid traders.

Many have written that there now exists two worlds - the real world in which we all actually live and try and survive in and that seen by a thin minority of financial people who are incredibly wealthy and believe that they are owed their extravagant living because of the essential work they do for the economy. They failed spectacularly - you cannot put it in any other terms as the scale of failure was so high that rich countries may be borrowing up to and beyond their GDP in order to pay for it in the near future, some countries went to the brink of bankruptcy. It means that all those profits that these people thought they were making were in fact made up - all of them and more were lost because they were never real.

All links to the fundamentals were lost and they violated the basic principles of a calculator let alone a financial system - the profits were only in their minds. Out there, in the real world, anyone with a modicum of intelligence could see that it was fundamentally and catastrophically flawed.

And now the remedy is failing by the actions of the same people who brought us down. We gave them more money than they lost and they cannot do the simple things we ask of them to help rescue the economy because they are too busy feathering their own nests again and justifying why the pursuit of incredibly high risk investments to produce imaginary profits to fuel their incredible bonuses is in fact the right thing to do for the good of us all - because if we didn't have such heroes, such Masters of the Univere (as Vince Cable calls them), we would be a sorry lot.

Well hello! The coffee's on and is smelling strongly, Ms. Knight. Some of the best talent in Britain, a whole generation of youth is languishing on the dole queue and we gave you every penny which saved your sorry skins. Now it's time to get a dose of reality - the world is very different to the one you see. The problem is, only when the Government drives those investment banker advisers out of their ears, stops pandering to the whims of incredibly wealthy people and stops appointing failed businessmen to key positons in the Lords and influential bodies, will we see some change.

But denial is a very powerful beast.

The Religious Species

It is a peculiar thing but, to our knowledge, humans are the only species on Earth and, in so far of our knowledge to date, the Universe that has the concept of Religion and God(s).

It's a particular thing to consider at the moment because, as with the Great Depression of 1929, more people are turning to their religion in tougher times and it is very curious as to why we would do that. What is it about religion that will give us the solutions to our financial or personal worries that could not be better tackled by our bank managers or psychologists if that were the case?

A staggering 84% of the population of Earth has a religion of some sort with Christianity occupying the largest share by percentage of humans while Islam is a close second. It could be argued that it is the particular differentiator within humans that gives us the power of deductive reasoning that gives us the such concepts - it comes with our intelligence.

Is that so? In the evolutionary cycle that suggests the fittest survive, it would be illogical to think a species with the concept of an afterlife would be favoured. After all, it gives little help in surviving today. So deductive reasoning would suggest we should not adhere to an afterlife concept as it does not help us increase our chances of survival today - and I am not being cynical here in terms of our quasi-religious wars or terrorism, just plain evolutionary terms. Of course, there is much in the preachings of religions which give us templates on how to live our lives that may be of great benefit, but I am looking at it from the raw issue of why a religion would help us as a species survive.

Deductive reasoning would also suggest that if we humans have the intelligence and power to reason so well, then it would point to only one solution the problem - i.e. one religion and possibly as a result, only one God. But that is not the case. In fact there are many, many religions practiced although it is fair to say Christianity, Islam and Hinduism are adopted by a combined 60% or more of the world's population. Islam and Christianity at their source are not entirely dissimilar, but it is a feature of both religions that each are sub-divided into many distinct groups which alone often have argued their differences on a bloody scale.

But my question is why an intelligent species would adhere to fantastical concepts when simple species do not - and arguably because of their simplicity they would know no better than say to worship a stone, the sun, another species or an invisible being? Pack animals look to leaders and respect hierarchy but that is a very different concept to worshipping a non-existent being. So why does intelligence give us the power to worship something that defies logic?

Recently, a Yale Professor, Paul Bloom, has contended that religion is part and parcel of our make up just as music or culture is part of us. That may stand the scrutiny of the majority of people, but some 16% of the world's population have no religious beliefs. If Bloom's assertion was true, then those 16% of people would be abnormally functioning and incapable of adopting culture or music either but that is not the case. There must be something more to it than that.

Let me just clarify this before people leap to conclusions - I am a Christian and I pursue a Christian way of life. I believe in something we do not understand beyond the boundaries we observe today so I am as much asking the question, 'Am I stupid to do so?' as ,'What compels me to do so?'

Religion - What's It All About?

Richard Dawkins, the famous author of 'The God Delusion' suggests religion is propagated through indoctrination, particularly in children and that evolution predisposes children to take whatever their parents/elders say as the truth and so is good for their survival, a sort of 'slavish gullibility'. Some would say that many children have an innate concept of a God and over half 4 year olds have 'imaginary friends'. Further, many adults form and maintain 'relationships' with dead relatives, many will imagine relationships with fictional characters and fantasy partners. It is perhaps no surprise that many people have alter egos which can conveniently be perpetuated online in places such as Second Life or even by having multiple email or Facebook accounts. Fantasy and the adherence to fantastical people or situations are very much part of the human imagination - is perhaps religion just a human exploitation of that imagination, as Dawkins may suggest?

There is much to be said about this. I still, some 14 and 19 years after their deaths, dream almost every night about my parents. In all my life, I have been able to imagine myself as part of fantastical situations like playing rugby for Wales, playing cricket for England or even fighting a war, being a secret agent and more - almost as if I am making movies in my head starring myself. It may be 'Walter Mitty'-like in some ways but I have no illusions that these are just imaginary scenarios and I am very at ease with my own ego in real life. I know what I am capable of and live with it.

It has been shown that many people who win vast sums in the lottery or who are fabulously wealthy find that the fantasy is much more rewarding than the reality - and we see many times that famous people find it hard to cope with their situation or very wealthy people find it hard to maintain close relationships; maybe it's because they cannot believe that real people would actually love them for anything but their wealth.

It's a digression, but I think it illustrates that central to human character and intelligence comes the 'need' to imagine things which do not have a sound logical basis. So perhaps the regimented story of a religion presents something which can be taken as a fact as it satisfies a very basic human need?

What Happened To Logic?

As a person who got qualified in science, I tend to ask more about the logic of things than most. I am in Stephen Hawkings' camp who wrote in his 'A Brief History of Time' that we should explore the universe and all the amazing science it as because when we discover the underlying mechanics only then will 'We truly know the Nature of God'. That actually satisfies the balance between logic and science for me. When you look at all the incredible complexities of things such as gravity and quantum mechanics you just have to think that something beyond our comprehension created it if, even if something like 'The Big Bang' throws all religions into a spin.

We are told that 'Faith' conquers and answers all questions. Religion has been at loggerheads with science for a long while - The Inquisition harried free thinking for hundreds of years until Copernicus had the 'heretical' courage to defy the Church and say that the planets revolved around the Sun. From that moment onward, human intelligence, thinking and experimentation leaped forward and a mere 170 years ago Charles Darwin perhaps challenged religion more fundamentally when he effectively unpicked the Bible by trashing Genesis and the creation of the Earth in 7 days and man in his own image. Over time, religions have come to accommodate science and where logic and religion cannot be reconciled, 'Faith' becomes the answer to fill the gaps.

Faith is superb belief mechanism - it not only reassures an individual that something is true but equally defends the assumption against close scrutiny . The mind closes and no amount of questioning of the assumption can violate its validity. Generally that's fine. But when when world leaders can make decisions that will cost many lives because of their faith that their God will know 'Their heart was pure' then there has to be a problem. I am not debating whether the religion in such an instant was right or wrong but I would say it would have been better to have considered facts and reality rather than trusting something illogical and fantastical.

The Get Out Of Jail Card

Here perhaps is the crux of the matter. We all need mechanisms to protect ourselves beyond body armour or a safe room. I have blogged about 'Denial as a coping method' before and the subject is linked. It's the idea if something does not stand the scrutiny of logic, then faith can answer the question - even though faith in an assumption may be wrong or at least illogical. 'Faith can move mountains' we are told - but there is a difference between 'willing' a mountain to be moved and spending a large fortune to deconstruct the said mountain, transporting the constituent parts and reconstructing it somewhere else, which may or may not be achievable depending on how much you want to spend. Faith did not land men on the Moon but I dare say someone had faith in the idea it could be done.

However, someone having Faith a war was just is a different matter. It assumes that the specific religion has a higher order than the other, yet even if religions themselves could survive deductive reasoning, then the notion that two religions were meritoriously different so much so as to cause a war is entirely illogical. Much better surely to review the facts and take a more reasoned view. This is where blind faith becomes incredibly dangerous and logic needs to be the more sound basis to solve major problems.

Further, many religions in arguing a template for sensible and decent living, preach against such violence yet once more Faith can be invoked to answer the illogical situation. I do not want to get drawn on current situations but when you apply deductive reasoning to many current conflicts you find that Faith is at the heart of much of the decision making.

Humans invariably need a 'Get out of Jail card', the notion that if something appears so wrong then their 'God' will reconcile it. They would rather argue the point at the Gates of Heaven than reason their actions to a living world which tends to indicate an incapability to reason rather than intelligence which is frightening. It is seen in many cultures that having a mistress is not an issue even though the man has taken solemn vows in front of his God, some use violence to get their ways and then hop along to Church and get their sins absolved. Luther started the Protestant Movement largely on disaffection with the corruption in the Church which got as bad as rich people buying a place in Heaven much as the rich may be the only ones who can buy a place of Virgin Galactic. At least Virgin Galactic may yet be proven to actually exist.

This ability to square things away with the imaginary is a coping mechanism that is dependent on denial and is a very human trait. You have to be able to shut yourself off from the questionable morals of an outcome in order to do it. Shoot now, ask questions later. In fact the higher a person ascends, the less questions are asked as the person seems closer to the mandate handed to them by a 'God', some claim to be even guided by or had an audience with a God to mandate them. It's innately very dangerous.

Religion - It's Circuitry Thing

Some scientists have argued that religion is part of our brain's hard wiring much as language is -according to Paul Bloom at Yale. Even atheists or agnostics are prone to supernatural thoughts or watching Harry Potter, and often such people will even harbour feelings that trauma in their lives has been caused by some kind of intervention. By extrapolation, it is not that they don't believe in a God, they are just muzzling it.

Maybe religion is a lifestyle thing - a part of culture. That only 16% of the world's population do not have one just makes them 'square' and those who follow Christianity, Islam and Hinduism just follow the fashion of the times. As daft as that sounds, people born into a certain culture adopt its ways and then mixing cultures can cause people to change. Religions have evolved over time. Before Christ, the concept of a single God was pretty alien even in very sophisticated society's such as the Greeks and Romans. The adoption of Christianity came very much as a result of the Roman Empire's adoption of it and that took some hard-ball negotiating to agree how and what it would be 'sold' as.

The fact of the matter is that even modern religions are evolving to accommodate the modern world in general. But when it comes down to an issue that deductive logic would give you the answer you do not want, blind faith, carved out out reasoning devised in the Dark Ages, is used as the cornerstone of decision making.

Perhaps one day, we will all take a step back and take a long hard look at the foundations on which we make momentous decisions that can cause terrible suffering, devastation and loss of life and just think that logic derived from a bunch of war-like zealots from the era of Saladin and Richard The Lionheart is not a sound basis for decision-making in a sophisticated world capable of annihilation and sending a man to the Moon.

Surely, we have moved on.

Hello My Name Is Nigel And I'm An Alcoholic

This frightful admission has been a long time coming but thanks to the Government's Health Police I have finally faced up to my problem. I am a middle-aged, professional (give me latitude here) Briton and I exceed recommended daily alcohol consumption levels.

Why Do I Do It?

It's a tough one to face up to. On weekdays I never have a drink before around 7pm in the evening, when most work things are over and my wife and I are at home. I don't drink during the day as my usually bad typing gets far worse making the spell checker give up and all I want to do is sleep. I never drink in the week at pubs and never on my own, and I rarely entertain clients with alcohol which must make me a stingy, uninteresting person to do business with come to think of it.

The evenings, though, are mine - all mine. I do like to relax and unwind with a stiff gin and tonic or a nice glass of Australian Chardonnay - call me a Philistine but it's New World over French for us as a) we are a brand person's dream and b) there are far too many chateaux to remember which one you had tasted good - I was probably too drunk anyway. Of course, in our household there is no such thing as a small gin and tonic and my measures are legendary and I rarely leave it at one when two is a rounder number and three is the king of numbers. As for wine, our everyday wine glasses are large enough to be classified as small buckets and if we open a cork bottle I fear it will go off if we don't finish it all and anyway it doesn't fit into the drinks fridge very well. The new screw tops are much better and very often we we will stop at one or two glasses and leave some left in the bottle - well we did once, I think.

With the new recommended daily alcohol consumption figures which mandate three to four units for men and two to three units per day for women, it is easy to see how I exceed these. A large glass of Australian wine which is stronger than continental brews, is three units and one of my gin and tonics can only be measured on the Richter Scale. According to these figures, I am consuming around double the recommended daily rate and that makes me an alcoholic.

Statistics, Damn Statistics

The Office for National Statistics (ONS), or 'Spoil Sports' as they are affectionately known, has done a study of around 13,000 households in Britain and it shows that over 37% regularly exceed the limits. Many middle-aged people like myself who responded to the survey said they knew the recommended safe limits and they did not see drinking a couple of large glasses of wine in the evening to unwind as exceeding the limit. I have to admit I fall into that category. I don't hide bottles or drink a bottle of vodka or meths a day or drink in the morning or lunch time for that matter but evening drinking is just as bad.

The study further reveals that middle-class drinkers were more likely to indulge in 'heavy' drinking which equated to double the recommended level - and I have a feeling that I must fall into that category. In fact around 25% of people admitted to exceeding the daily rate at least once a week. My saving grace is that if I am picking my wife up from the station late, I will rarely drink more than a glass after she arrives home before retiring for the night - other than that, I must be classified as a 'heavy' drinker.

Denial

Boy have I blogged on denial and here I am right in the middle of it myself. While I view such reports as indicative of the 'Nanny State' once again telling us what we should do and how to live our lives, apart from my younger rugby playing days, I have always regarded myself as an occasional drinker who enjoys a tipple in the evening while relaxing. Until around a year ago, I was a massive gym person and would do around 90 minutes of good exercise including rowing, cross-training, weights and swimming in my routines 5 days a week and be very fit for my age. That changed when I started working more from my 'home office' and although I walk my dogs regularly, occasionally mountain bike across rough terrain, I am now far more sedentary and weight and shape has increased. The reality is, with my consumption of alcohol, I am more likely to be a target for heart or liver disease. And certainly, since not going to the gym regularly, I have felt far less healthy and have been more susceptible to minor ailments and muscular problems.

But my biggest mistake is alcohol and I have been in denial about it. It's too easy to do.

So What Is To Be Done?

The Nanny State is clucking like a mother hen but as usual it has no real solutions. What would have been handy is to have had a small booklet to accompany this report with a handy 5 Step Plan to healthy living that introduced some Patagonian fruit-based drink that looked and smelt like wine, gave you the same feeling of mild euphoria in a tough world, cost less than a decent Viognier, had fewer calories than a cucumber, regenerated any damage to the liver, brain cells and heart walls, warded off cancer, gout and obesity and made you ultra attractive to the opposite sex. I have done the 'one month - no alcohol' thing before Christmas and abruptly stopped when someone told me that one of the surest signs of alcoholism was the trying to prove you can stop for a month and then drinking like a old dart player afterwards. During that month I actually did not feel like having a drink and I slept like an old dog every night, waking feeling quite chipper. The only moment of anxiety came as I tried to nod off to sleep each night as I had a stark realisation that some day I would die.

It's strange that alcohol suppressed that urge while probably hastening my exit from this world.

So the only thing for it is to sit down and give myself a stiff talking to. I often chide myself in the car for driving like an idiot, missing a turning or being late. You can always spot me - I'm the one who looks like he's talking on the phone in the car but am actually having a detailed argument with myself or the radio presenter. I have put the world to rights many times and there isn't a Government Minister who would actually be happy to be my passenger as I always have something to wallop them with. So it's going to have to be one of those sessions and it isn't going to be easy.

I can handle the exercise bit. There is a new gym not far away with reasonable membership fees and within cycling range. Between that and better weather on the horizon I can get my bike serviced and take the dogs out for an hour each day while cycling over fantastic, rugged terrain excellent for aerobic stuff and leg muscles. Of course, the dogs don't like it so much but they are Border Collies and it's time they behaved like the ones on TV. So with that side sorted out, surely I can eat and drink as much as I like?

Oh No You Can't

The trouble with this damn report is that even if you are as fit as Steve Redgrave you need to drink less than three units a day. I have given up on my aspirations to carry the Olympic Torch ever since I saw that chap race around the Beijing Stadium suspended on a wire - I can neither match that nor stand the heights. But do I have to stop drinking so much? After all, one glass really doesn't do much, it's the second that counts and by that time the bottle may as well be finished. I don't smoke, for heaven's sake, and I have never done anything worse than Nurofen Plus in my life even when I had my eyes lasered (yes - I was the idiot who thought Ibuprofen and codeine was strong enough to suppress the pain after having your eyes burnt to a cinder. It wasn't until the second day of agony, locked in a dark room muttering to myself miserably that I called the surgeon and he politely but firmly told me I was an idiot and urged that I took the right pills. The pain evaporated almost immediately). Surely I am not a case cruising for the 'Big Sleep' early doors?

The fact is I am late forties and above my punching weight, taking less exercise than a sloth and have a sedentary job - and yes, I drink far too much and we haven't even got on to eating. Considering everything in that context it's a bit of wonder I haven't dropped dead beforehand.

Right - That's It Then

OK - I am going to have to argue with myself about it and pour that lovely yellow and red elixir down the sink and get on my bike to the gym.

But it's time to start work, it's raining outside and I feel a slight chill coming on. My Mum always told me, hot whisky was the best cure and I think I shall have one before bed tonight. Purely medicinal of course and, like mayonnaise on tuna, Branston on cheese or port with Stilton, that doesn't count.