January 7th 2010

I was travelling home on the tube before Christmas when I noticed opposite me a middle-aged man in a pin-striped suit, his head deep in large paperback edition of that bible of capitalist individualism and entrepreneurship, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Then I noticed that around his neck he was wearing a plastic security card for Royal Bank of Scotland – the bank that has become a symbol for the way the greed and hubris of the financial sector has brought the economy to its knees. It was a juxtaposition so rich in irony that I felt like following him off the train and congratulating him. When I got home it crossed my mind that he had been a piece of performance art.

Another tube journey: this time opposite me someone is reading a newspaper. The front page stares at me: a photograph of a thirty-something blonde. Above her is the headline Thirteen Years of Mystery. An English Home Counties version of A Hundred Years of Solitude.