UFO Info Week-End

Inflation over the past year is back down to 2 per cent exactly in the middle of the target range with core inflation

Inflation over the past year is back down to 2 per cent, exactly in the middle of the target range, with core inflation even lower. The economy may be slowing but low inflation makes the prospect of a cut in interest rates – should the economy need it – perfectly viable. The great concern of last year, the booming housing market, has been tamed without provoking a crash. Where is the 40-minute, £65 explanation of why one should want such a thing, following you round the streets, pumping music into your ears?

More from Philip Hensher.

Don’t we have enough old trouts with Equity cards already?* For a small fee of £65, Selfridge’s is prepared to teach you how to use your new MP3 player. Apparently there are people who buy the things without the faintest idea of how to use them, and are very grateful for the 40-minute lesson. Leaving aside, however, the question of why a salesman or the manufacturers’ instructions can’t help out the bewildered for nothing, there remains a question for those of us for whom recorded music is something you put on, and then sit down and listen to. Sooner or later, we are bound to get fed up of Americans trying to kick-start their careers with the perceived cool of a transatlantic career and, subsequently, noisy complaints about our plumbing traditions. Europeans have, certainly, always appreciated a wider range of feminine charms than Americans.

I wonder, however, how far the appeal of the ageing starlet goes, even here. Look at Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve and Sophia Loren, my God I could go on. They are all working.”She has a point here, though frankly I think it total impudence of her to compare her “experience and body of work” with that of Jeanne Moreau. So let’s just go on being smug about being British, with or without an extra day off work.