I'm no royalist, but I was rather charmed by the Diamond Jubilee, in the main. I couldn't face the ghastly concert thing (Macca and "Oh-bla-di" I ask you!!!), but I watched the whole of the wet flotilla. And in common with most of us I suspect, I was not charmed by the inane coverage by the BBC, (rightly slammed for being fatuous, dumbed-down and gratuitously jolly), but hugely charmed by the central figure, our tiny monarch, her staunch professionalism, her radiant smile through it all. But didn't it go on and on? A wonderful Tweet went out yesterday which read "Day 4 of bloody Jubilee. Now everybody knows how it feels to sit through an Indian wedding". You have to laugh.
So a welcome distraction for the country and understandable for us all to hang onto our biggest symbol of continuity, when all around us is in total disarray. But back to work with a bump today (although some of us UKR saddos worked on the bank holidays; there's just so little resource and so much to do!) and things seem to be in even more disarray than ever! As Dorothy Parker would have said "what fresh hell is this?" Blow me down, if we haven't lurched into a new crisis in the shape of the Spanish banking meltdown. And it looks as if this has weeks to play out now, destabilising everyone and making the money peeps hysterical all over again (a bit tough on those of us nearly there with our financing packages). Stefan Webb reminds me of the famous quote from Richard Mottram, senior civil servant of the day in 2002 as quoted to Andrew Rawnsley: "We're all f****d, I'm f****d, you're f****d. The departments f****d. It's the biggest cock up ever and we're all completely f****d." And frankly, the commentators seem to be at a complete loss to make sense of any of it, let alone the ordinary soul.
Even in my little microcosm of UK regeneration activity, the lunatics seem to have taken over the asylum. I was much disturbed by a report from the Association of Consultancy and Engineering last week that claims tax increment financing schemes could provide the basis of a new model of private finance initiative. The headline screamed "TIF principles could improve PFI" and you can only put your head in your hands and weep. I said as much on Twitter, but it's kind of hard to develop an argument in 140 characters. People are so desperate for solutions they'll latch onto any old discredited model as the holy grail. We need to go to basics: let's look at what we're trying to achieve guys, rather than put some model central to the thinking (let alone the conflation of two models of dubious distinction). As form follows function, the model deployed should follow the desired output. Not the other way around.
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