From The Times

October 10, 2008

What did you do in the great banking crisis?

A man sobbing in McDonald's is the only thing I've seen falling apart

Hugo Rifkind

Have you been into a McDonald's lately? Do people still do that? I was in one the other night. McChicken Sandwich. First time in ages. It was Oxford Street, in London, and almost everybody in there was French. This was a relief. I wrote a feature a couple of months ago about how the French were all nuts for McDonald's. It was nice to see I hadn't been making it up.

Like I said, almost everybody. There was one other guy who, like me, was in a suit. He could have been French, but I doubt it. His briefcase was on the floor, between his smart brown shoes, and his head was between his knees. He was sobbing.

I suppose he'd been there a while. They'd put a McDonald's flunky at a table behind him, presumably in case he stopped crying at any point and brought out, say, an axe. I asked if he was OK, and the flunky said he was. So I sat down at the next table. He was still there when I left. Still sobbing, too.

Do you reckon he had anything to do with banks? I've decided to assume that he did. Because it's all a bit nebulous otherwise, isn't it? In 50 years' time, a historian might ask me what life was like back in 2008, when everybody thought the banks were falling apart? And I'll tell him: “I saw a man in a suit sobbing in McDonald's.”

Hey, at least it's an anecdote. Without that man, who was probably just drunk anyway, I'd have nothing to say at all. Shouldn't a world crisis feel more immediate than this? Banks have broken the world by fabricating billions, and governments are trying to fix it by fabricating more billions, and none of it seems to mean anything.

I'm not trying to sell my house, and I have barely any savings, Icelandic or otherwise. I don't mean to sound callous, but financial disaster hasn't changed my life one bit. I bet a lot of other people's lives haven't changed much either. And yet, apparently we are all going to hell in a handcart anyway. It's getting tiring.

It's like being constantly told that you have a terrible disease. Only there aren't any symptoms. And if it weren't for that grim Scottish doctor who keeps peering in your ear and muttering “doom, doom”, you'd be convinced that you were absolutely fine.

Hot news

Strange, though, the stuff we cling to, to have something to understand. Back in the Middle Ages, they'd have floods and fires and famines and, for want of anything better to do, they'd burn a witch. This week, for a while, it seemed like they might burn Robert Peston.

Then there was the curry. Nobody seems entirely sure whether the Government's latest rescue plan was £50 billion or £500 billion or perhaps a few billion more, but everybody knows that it was thrashed out over a meal for 32 from Gandhi's Indian takeaway in Kennington.

Some dissent, though, over its content. This newspaper spoke of tandoori chicken, which I obviously believe, even though the Evening Standard and The Scotsman swore blind that it was chicken korma, pilau rice and poppadoms, and the Financial Times ran a quote, no less, of the Chancellor personally ordering “boiled rice and sag aloo”. The Guardian had Darling placing his order at 8.30pm, and The Independent said that the food came at 9.30. The Times said the order was placed at 9pm, the Evening Standard said it arrived at 10pm. We may never know the truth. Disloyal as it may sound, I favour The Guardian's version. Only that newspaper also brought us the bill, which came to £245. That's 0.000004p for every man woman and child in the United Kingdom.

Afterwards, all agree that they had biscuits.

Zoo time

Only another month, thank God, and the US election will finally be over. Already, it has lasted far, far too long. Civilisations have risen and fallen. Wars have come and gone. Angelina Jolie has had at least two babies. And still the candidates pontificate and debate, and their supporters bicker about nonsense in the comments bit under videos on YouTube.

It's the videos that are killing me. There are just so many of them, and they are all about nothing. Barack Obama will appear at a Wichita high school, say, and be filmed telling a little girl that his favourite zoo animal is a penguin. Then, two days later, an older video will emerge, perhaps from 1995, in which he tells another little girl that his favourite zoo animal is a tiger. Cue uproar.

“OMG!!!!” a thousand people will write underneath. “OBARMA is a LAIR!!!” And then people will e-mail it to each other and right-wing bloggers, without the merest twitch of humour, will dub it “Zoogate”. Then somebody will ask John McCain about his favourite zoo animal at a press conference, and he'll say a cheetah, and somebody else will splice all these videos together under a headline that says “ZOOGATE: HERO VS A HIPPOCRATE!” and you'll see it and laugh, even though it probably isn't a joke at all.