Livre d'Or

Sometime, we should sit down with a good bottle of port or brandy, and discuss this at length.

You have some interesting points there, about what welfare sytems are for - but you haven't got the cynicism necessary to consider the unpleasant possibility that our elected leaders now view the population using the welfare state as a productive political punchbag for gaining the approval of the Daily Mail; and worse, they view it as a mechanism for entrenching poverty and exacerbating insecurity.

As for oppressive debt, I got a lesson in that, working late at night and passing through the fifth-floor vending 'mall' for coffee: the TV monitor was showing news of Haiti and the Hurricane (or was it an earthquake), and some senior banker wandered in...

"Oh dear", he said: "The Presidential Palace".

And people *do* tut-tut: he did, and turned to me:

"They're still paying us the interest on loans for that, you know: and they will have carry on"; and he was well aware of what that cost in human terms, and what it meant - and still means - in terms of funds diverted from relief and reconstruction from the natural disaster, live in colour on the news.