In its early days, the Credit Crunch was fun. We all pointed and laughed at the bankers shuffling out of Canary Wharf with cardboard boxes under their arms; the former masters of the universe now had to contemplate a life without Porsches and caviar on-tap. The Financial Times had lied to them and all was not rosy in the Garden of Eden. We laughed at the people queuing outside Northern Rock even though their money had been guaranteed. The reporter gave a wry smile as he questioned the silly worry-pots who one after the other would exclaim; “I just don’t trust ‘em!”

What followed was a gradual period of transition. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly the end of the honeymoon period for the Credit Crunch but one could make a guess that it was when it started to affect actual human beings as opposed to financiers and bankers.

Rolling news channels were among the few who welcomed the recession with open arms as their jobs now consist entirely of listing companies that have gone bust, interviewing bargain hunters/looters outside Woolworths and occasionally asking Alistair Darling, a man whose eyebrows clearly don’t belong to him, what the bloody hell he is doing. They could for all intents and purposes be replaced by teletext and no-one would notice. One thing though is for certain though; monotony is monotony.

Even the collapse of global capitalism can begin to wear a bit thin when we are constantly told about nothing else all day, every day. If the gruelling episodes that were the ‘foot and mouth’ crisis and then ‘bird flu’ and ‘swine flu’ revealed anything, it was that the British public are extremely capable of becoming immune to crises. In much the same way that we are now immune to images of a bomb blast in Baghdad, a factory or business closing down now warrants as much attention as a local farmer losing a goose. As I contemplate this, I can’t help feel a tinge of sympathy for those who had to endure 6 years of war in Europe. Hitler’s uniformed tyranny would no doubt have become tedious during the Second World War; “Oh he’s invaded another country? That’s nice dear, what’s on the wireless?”

While most of us are still in a situation where we can still be light-hearted about our looming destitution, it would be heartless not to recognise many people will be seriously affected by what is happening. That being said, we hardly need another buzz-word to make our hearts jump or trigger a guilt reflex when we hear it, which is every day, several times a day. The ditty alliteration of ‘Credit Crunch’ now instils the same fear as ‘Carbon Footprint’ once did.

Sadly with financial troubles being what they are and newscasters clambering to explain complex economic meltdowns in 10 second, succinct, sound-bite sentences, it seems we’re doomed to be assaulted on all sides by it for the foreseeable future.

Richard Hall