Doomed, I tell you, doomed...

If memory serves (and it is getting increasingly dodgy), it was that Scottish undertaker in Dad's Army who used to claim, at frequent intervals, that we are all doomed. But actually he was about fifty years ahead of time.

Take, for instance, one of today's headlines. It is reported that the G20 'wishes to express its alarm about the eurozone crisis.'

Well, aren't we lucky. We have political leaders who are so perceptive and supernaturally well informed that they think we should know there is a bit of a problem.

Problem? Is that what you call it? Listen, I just sit here and read the occasional blog, and look at a few newspapers in my local Costa, and I am here to tell you that for the past year I have been quietly wetting myself with panic. It seems that it wasn't enough for the banks to fuck things up big-time in 2008. No, they are filled, it seems, with an overwhelming desire to do it all over again!  While stealing money from you and me in the process.

I can't be arsed to look up the precise figures, because it's all too depressing, but the RBS, which owns the NatWest, with whom all my pathetic little pile of money is stored, seems to have lost 1 billion pounds sterling in the first quarter of this year. Well done boys! A billion in one quarter! Think how much you could lose if you really tried.

I tell you, if in a year from now I still have enough pennies left to buy a cup of coffee which allows me to read newspapers for free, I shall be pleasantly surprised.

Meanwhile.... There is a silver lining to this cloud. Because the book business is booming, right?

Um, well... Sort of.

The Sun tells us that Fifty Shades of Grey, 'about a depraved relationship between a young virgin and her rich older lover', is now the fastest-selling paperback since records began. And it's 'sexually explicit', says The Sun, drooling so much that it makes the newsprint all soggy.

Well, there you are then. If sales of that order can't put lead in the economy's pencil I don't know what will. Salvation comes (heh, heh) in the form of Mommy porn.

Or not, as the case may be.

Meanwhile, if you want to know what happened in 2008, you really have to read Michael Lewis's The Big Short, which is highly entertaining if you have a taste for black humour. If you haven't, it will probably give you a stroke.