Although pretty much every week in the local press, I am not so often in the economist, the last time but one being about iceland. I used the bankrupt european outpost as an allegory to the uk to wax lyrical about the inevitability of it losing its own currency and eventually joining the euro (ditching the krona – is sterling next ?). Now, it looks that while the first of those presumptions may hold true, the second may not, as so bad is the euro’s reputation at the moment, iceland may instead adopt the canadian dollar. This is not quite as mad as it seems (and indeed mirrors a newt gingrich proposal for the uk to join nafta) because trade…

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In 1996, while I was living there, israel assassinated yechiel ‘the bombmaker’ ayyash in gaza. It was supposedly in retaliation for his work developing palestinian suicide bombings. Of course as night follows day it led to a whole new spate of such bombs, several of which I was caught up with on the streets of tel aviv. Israelis do panic and pandemonium in a pretty orderly way, and looking back now it’s amazing how quickly you learn to live with the fact that the bus you’re about to get on might well explode. I recall one friend on such a bus. 30-odd people were killed, but as he was sat at the back, he walked away with cuts and bruises…

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With excuses for a rare lapse into the day job, but we were everywhere yesterday. Amongst other things I was having afternoon tea in the house of lords with lord nat wei, but meanwhile our economic advisory panel were putting the finishing touches to a greater manchester “growth plan”, that the chair, jim o’neill (14 january 2010), was talking about on bbc radio 4’s “pm” programme (21:30). It’s being launched next week with a good quorum of ministers in attendance led by danny alexander. Meanwhile, over in the south of france, our high-powered delegation were wooing global developers and investors at the legendary “mipim” propertyfest, well covered in the press, especially the “appliance of science” material based on graphene, already…

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As a family, we have conservative tastes in toothpaste. My other half, who has a homeopathic side, eventually found a perfect one for our kids, when they were young in germany, and so when we left we brought a year’s supply with us. We picked up the same when travelling there a year later, giving us the excellent tale to tell of travelling to germany to shop for toothpaste; rather spoilt when we found it in a health shop in bramhall a few miles down the road. A year later though, crunch time, and failed internet shopping coupled with the acceptance that by now we should probably be using fluoride, helped bring in a second choice but accepted alternative, to…

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Cyprus is just about to take on its first eu presidency. Well, two-thirds of the island is, as, across barbed wire, the rest lies outside the union. It is, depending on your point of view, either a legitimate state seeking unification, or under turkish occupation. It is a complicated issue, and one where the eu has not covered itself in glory, as one of the protagonists, greece (5 november 2011), is in, whilst the other, turkey (23 november 2011), though a noisy nato member, is out. The eu blew its best of chance of solving the problem by failing (with a greek gun to its head on the whole enlargement) to exert any leverage with the accession of the south…

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With my time helping run trafford’s hospitals at an end, I have now joined the board of a new venture, bridgewater. The difference about this particular nhs hospital trust, is that it has no hospitals - it is a “community” trust. Basically, we try to do what it says on the tin: improving health and wellbeing in the various populations we serve. In passing, this kind of care (with a big dollop of generalisation) is safer, as hospitals are the place patients are most likely to contract illness, more popular, as people generally want treating at home or close to it and cheaper, as it has much less expensive fixed costs. The latter is key in a world where the…

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A thoughtful piece from noam chomsky, who we sort of named our second son after. He bemoans the wilful lack of any remembrance of the beginning of the vietnam war, and quickly arrives at chomsky’s favourite theme of american power and its abuse, which is never apparent because in chomsky’s phrase, only the weak and defeated are called to account for their crimes. That is a better formulation that the victor writing history, because that is not of course how america finished up, either in vietnam or, as chomsky moves easily to, iraq. The scale of that defeat, which chomsky sees as deeper than generally perceived, presages the flood of headlines about whether america is over. This not new: several…

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Two inciteful economist articles tip their hat to the weight of evidence emerging that china, which we can read as shorthand for the growth (nee emerging) markets, is finally “decoupling” from the west’s stuttering economies (1 january 2012), driven finally, by domestic growth. Even as its growth continued exponentially (by 9.2.%, meaning its economy has grown by 60% since 2008), china’s net exports fell in 2011. Both public and private domestic consumption is on the rise, accounting now for about half china’s growth. Yet, its housing boom slowed markedly, with prices falling in 52 of the largest 70 cities - a positive sign that consumer growth is not just a property bubble. Even more eye-catching, china’s foreign reserves have…

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Wonderful evening on saturday, at the school, for a unique havdallah service that was for year threes, or first year juniors in old money. Every family, about thirty of us, had to bring in a family artefact, and preferably an old member of the family or two, and each of the children got up on stage (usually with parent) to tell the tale of the book, photo, candlestick or becher they’d brought in. We took the one thing I have from my grandfather abraham, a silver chanukiah, and told the story of how he left danzig in 1909 with his father for a new life in america, only for some dastardly captain to sail around the baltics for a couple…

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