I think I’ve gone on before about the emotional and physiological effects that exceptional, unexpected events can have on people: an icy-cold sinking feeling of eviscerated powerlessness, for starters.  Such feelings must be especially intense for those who exercise significant power and yet meet more than their match when a complex system turns against them.

Financial markets and wars represent the most severe tests for politicians, who can probably feel pretty satisfied with themselves on a day-to-day basis that some part of the world appears (at least) to dance to their tune. But today, on BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House programme, veteran political journalist Michael Cockerell, in partnership with presenter Paddy O’Connell, provided some long overdue insights into those limits of power by joining the dots between the current financial crisis surrounding the Brown government/Chancellor Alastair Darling and previous occasions when proud governments have been forced through the mincer.  There are some real insights here for fans of Gordonfreude.

Cockerell has interviewed eight British prime ministers, so is fairly unusual among current working journalists.  Today’s 15-minute segment (about 32 minutes into the programme found here on iPlayer: podcast version here) is definitely worth your while clicking through to. It’s also the first time I’ve seen news media challenge the orthodoxy (apparently accepted by most journalism) that the economic problems now facing the UK are mostly a function of external events.  Cockerell observes an historical pattern.

For a long time  it has been very convenient in Labour mythology to blame the international speculators, ‘the banker’s ramp’, as it was called.

But perhaps more interesting are the personal recollections of Labour Chancellors Jim Callaghan, Denis Healey, and Tory Norman Lamont of a collapse in the pound.  This following reflection is from John Major, the then Prime Minister, on Lamont’s demeanour the day sterling was ejected from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM):-

Norman Lamont came in and he was pretty white-faced and edgy, as well he might have been, and he said ‘It hasn’t worked’ by which he meant the intervention and the two-per-cent interest rise. ‘It hasn’t worked, and they’re still selling.’

The starkest warning for politicians about that experience comes though from Kenneth Clarke, the last Tory chancellor before the current Labour government, and a cabinet member on that Black Wednesday.

We were powerless in the face of events.  I think I had always believed theoretically in the power of markets but I’d never seen such a dramatic illustration–felt such a dramatic illustration–that the Prime Minster, the Chancellor, leading members of the government were utterly out of control of events and the markets were going to devalue the pound.”

For the diligent who care to listen to the end, there’s a good line about King Canute.

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Never mind credit risk, the risk of a falling tree (or a branch at least) has been on my mind for nearly five years. A large oak tree, listed by the local authority, and which I don’t own but which overhangs my front garden, has lost rotten branches with nearly every gale during that time. And I’ve worried, with each puff of wind, that one might end up hitting me/the kids/wife/milkman or the increasing number of Fed-Ex deliverers of dead-tree books for me to (not quite get round to) review.

A few weeks ago, the person responsible for the tree finally got the necessary approval and had it duly pruned and thinned. Relief. Only the goldcrests that once or twice I’ve seen flitting in and out of the branches were inconvenienced.

But it shows that, where you focus on one risk, an even greater and less obvious risk might be creeping up on you until some kind of tipping point is reached, and it figuratively knocks your block off.

Regular readers will know that I am probably a bit too hung up on all this self-organized criticality stuff. And the scientifically-trained may scoff that this may all be a metaphor too far. But bear with me while I indulge in a little narrative fallacy; it is the first anniversary of the credit crunch after all.

Sometime around 3pm on Wednesday there was a resounding crack when half an apple tree in the neighbour’s garden shuddered and collapsed into ours (amidst a confused shower of slightly immature green fruit) landing as it fell on a recently reconstructed Bath stone wall. Bizarrely, we were able to look out of the office window, just as the sound happened, and watch it fall.

Now, it may just have been a rotten bough that gave way, and that would have happened at that moment come hell or high water (there has been a lot of rain these past two years). But I’d suggest a slightly more complex chain of events led up to this apple windfall, one that would somewhat mitigate the failure to notice (on the part of the householder) the tree’s precarious state: I’m generous that way, you know. And, there may be a useful lesson in thinking about how and when a tipping point is reached, given what happened in the markets a year ago today.

Only a few months ago, a most enormous bay tree (as tall as a house, and with multiple trunks) was removed on our side so that the wall could be rebuilt and made safe (another long-time worry). I can’t say for sure, but since the bay tree went, the two apple trees either side looked like they were yielding a lot more fruit and more quickly than we’ve seen in years before. They were certainly full of blossom in the spring.

I don’t know how much in the way of nutrients that bay tree would have drawn each day — or how much water — but it had to have had some significant impact on the relative fertility of the surrounding soil, as a not inconsiderably dominant node in the immediate ecology. Or, maybe the boughs of the apple were inclined in earlier years to lean their increasing weight on their big brother bay as their crop ripened. Who knows?

But one day, three burly men, a couple of packets of Benny Hedgehogs, a chain saw and a Bobcat came along, and pretty soon the bay tree and its massive root-structure were gone. The apple trees breathed again –perhaps their deepest breaths in twenty years — and suddenly our vulnerable, once-dwarfed friend was the dominant plant in its neighbourhood.

Flushed with its new-found confidence, and benefiting from a good combination of moisture and summer sun, what was to stop it growing the largest, most numerous apple stock in its entire life?

In part because of my paleo diet, I’ve somehow become a bit more obsessed with things growing. Equipped with a 5 mega-pixel camera-phone I have taken to excessively recording the growth of much garden flora and publishing it for the benefit of my sole Flickr photostream subscriber. This is micro-local, social media at its most extreme and is as far out into the long tail as you can go without disappearing. But I don’t want you to think that I’m lonely. Or that my one subscriber is; he has lots of “friends”. [By the way, I subscribe to his photostream too. He does hard urban, melancholic shots through rain-drenched bus windows; I do rural/leafy suburbia.] This has been going on a while now, of course. Some of you might even remember my so-called long apple harvest from last year.

So what’s the point? Well, while it is always true that one thing leads to another, and so this is a banal little story of ordinary, back-garden apple trees, I’ve taken recently to enjoying a cup of herbal tea mid-afternoon on the bench immediately beneath that now-departed branch in order to soak up some Vitamin D. With the wall below head-height, that makes me very lucky indeed. Of course, I’m not one to hoard my good fortune, nor my windfall of apples, so I want to share this pertinent piece of advice from the late, great Glenn Miller. As they say, if you know what’s good for you…

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I was feeling guilty about my carbon footprint as I drove four teenagers to the airport on the other side of London last night, so I decided to swing back via the Royal Albert Hall. Although five minutes late for the start of the late night BBC Prom concert, I was nevertheless admitted halfway through at 10:40pm on a £5 standing-room ticket.

It was a serendipitous opportunity for me to hear the world-renowned Tallis Scholars sing some Renaissance Franco/Flemish choral music by Obrecht, Ockeghem and Josquin Des Prez that was completely unfamiliar to me. You can listen too by going here for the next few days on BBC iPlayer.

Well what has this got to do with broken things, the putative subject of this blog? The answer is contained in the poetic words used in the middle piece to replace those lost in the mists of time. The music by Ockeghem remains, but with its title only, Malheur me bat, which might be described as the French opposite of “opportunity knocks”. It has not been sung in modern times, so the Tallis Scholars, under Peter Phillips, commissioned a modern French poet to pen something new. And here is a translation of that chanson for three voices (to be found 49 minutes in):-

Misfortune has struck me/battered me,

My heart is sad.

Joy has moved away,

My birds have all taken flight.

Sorrow lays me low.

I am the tree in the night that will not see the morning light;

That will not see the morning nor hear them sing in Latin.

Misfortune has battered me,

Sorrow lays me low.

Well, it doesn’t come much more knackered than that. And it was almost 3am by the time I got home. For someone who is making a point at the moment of observing a fairly strict sleep regime, this looks like a category error. But, as Steve McQueen said in The Magnificent Seven, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Listen and I hope you’ll agree that it was.

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