Christmas day at the Highgate Ponds – where allegedly lunatics and pike swim and crayfish behave like sharks – is the top of the yearly swimming market; overpopulated with unfamiliar crowds pulled in by the ‘greasepaint’ momentum of the occasion but woefully unfamiliar with the joys of swimming throughout the seasons.
In consequence, it is my habit along with the other waterfowl to duck out of the Christmas day plunge; going short of the mulled wine, the hoisting of the Union flag on the ruins of the old high diving board of the long vanished, once celebrated, Highgate Diving Club; the traditional bugle call across its steel grey water – and of course, the hyperventilating joy of Christmas Day hyper cold water as men in rubber swimming hats and snow white bodies, dive in to race across its bitterly chilling surface – to the distant cheers of a well wrapped, North London spectacle seeking onlookers. Even the ducks, coots and the grebes take off until this Christmas day festive peak is passed, and the place sinks quietly back into the consoling values of solitude and the wintery beauty of Boxing Day, when I returned.
Dickens’s famous City figure, the august and cheerful Mr Samuel Pickwick, made his name at the Pickwick Club with his admirable research paper on the source of the Highgate Ponds and the life of sticklebacks; they still inhabit its waters along with the man eating crayfish beloved of contemporary journalists, in need of a good and fearful story to tell their daunted readers. Even Dickens’s did not come up with the idea of ferocious crayfish although he did create the thieving, murdering Bill Sykes and the escaped prisoner Magwich who terrified young Pip on the Kent marshes.
And talking of birds, as I raise my eyes to the wider world, I get some satisfaction from seeing chickens coming home to roost in the rookeries of the Bank of England. The retiring Governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King, has been telling the world that the UK government should not rely on the Bank’s monetary policy to save the UK economy from recession, but do something itself to stimulate economic growth in dear old Blighty. Shouts of ‘hear, hear’ ring out but it is curious talk from a man who hitherto has told the Mr. Osborne that he was following exactly the right policy in sticking to his ‘no turning back’, plan ‘A’ only, policy.
A few of us spotted the defects of such an approach as early as the autumn of 2010, when the Chancellor revealed his ‘one strategy only’ plan. Why has it taken so long for the Governor of the Bank of England to wake up to the lack of balance and common sense of the official economic policy of the UK over the last twenty four months? It looks a little too regrettably like the blind leading the blind amidst the mustard gas of economics.
To some of us who try to be guided by the street wise empiricism of markets, it was obvious that the foreign buying of sterling and gilts had much to do with diversifying out of the Euro and little to do with dealer’s high opinion of Mr. Osborne’s policy. Now that the Euro has undergone its deathbed recovery, sterling is being sold off and yields on 10 year gilts, are in consequence above 2% and heading higher. The Government lost the golden opportunity to stimulate the UK economy enough, when overseas central banks were pursuing their obvious policy of diversification out of the Euro.
Now they are buying it again, economically stagnant Blighty, awaits a downgrade by rating agencies. However, it is an ill-wind that blows nobody any good. At least we have a devaluing pound to help stimulate demand for British goods and services; exactly the right medicine when UK domestic demand is flat on its back and there is capacity for more exports.
And now back to the snow. The teachers may not be able to handle a five minute walk to work inm a warm classroom but this man is made of sterner stuff. The ponds beckon…
Robert Sutherland Smith will be posting his Pond Life column once a month here on TomWinnifrith.com from now onwards. I welcome my venerable 157 year old friend and ex t1ps colleague to this site.