Why on Earth would anyone welcome such a terrible disaster?

Well, the truth of the matter is, I believe governments, closely followed by most media channels, all benefit from a frightened population, as suggested by Michael Crichton in the last book of his I read. Can't remember the title, but have a look at what he has written over the last few years and you'll find it. The main premise in the book is that Global Warming is a myth as far as the end of the world is concerned, and that nature will generate feedback systems to compensate.

Now I don't know whether this Global Warming is true or not, and if it is whether it is caused by man and man alone, but the fact of the matter is that when I was a boy, we were not bombarded with tragic stories of child murders, rape, incest every day, for weeks on end for each tragic happening. We essentially believed that life was good, and that adults could be pretty much trusted (except that the 'stranger' was the baddy). Not that bad stuff didn't happen you understand, but there was a sense of perspective - If one person in a million dies a terrible death every day, it wasn't worth the entire country moping about it.

We would cycle for miles in the country, hunt rats, fish, camp out, play with dogs that had never been wormed, drink raw milk, swim in old open cast lead mines, eat lots of stuff that I wouldn't now. We came near to having a few accidents, but almost always survived.

We were threatened with the nuclear arms race, clusters of leukaemia, the cold war, the cod war, the falklands. But did we care? Apart from the few affected, not really.

Now, the reason I am glad that the credit crunch has come, is that it has got rid of bird flu. No longer is mankind about to be wiped off the face of the earth by this evil stalking us out of the east. We had a dead swan wash up about fifty miles away, but we didn't all get struck down by the evil virus, and fortunately this year, even though the swans are once more migrating in our general direction, they aren't a problem because everyone has bigger fish to fry.

And maybe, just maybe, we can get a sense of perspective. In ten years time, this credit crunch will just be a memory, and maybe the global warming will have been identified as part of a twenty-thousand year cycle, and bird flu may not be the problem they thought it was going to be.

Here's hoping.