“The blonde iPod girl” sits in front of me, one table away. She is young, pretty, wearing a nice casual black pullover and white shirt, with carefully coloured red finger nails. She is listening to music and studying, clearly a University student. I am having a coffee and going through my newspaper, but I still noticed her and what she is doing. Quietly, I am almost running out of newspaper, the coffee already gone, and I am considering either leaving or asking her what she is studying. She is now on the phone, nice voice too. Then she gets up, moves towards me and asks me to look after her stuff for a few minutes while she goes outside. She smiles, I smile and I say yes, no problem. I start reading again some pages of the newspaper. She is back and is now at the counter ordering a coffee and a sandwich, which seems like her lunch, brings everything to her table and thanks me, smiling. I smile back. After some more minutes and another phone call she is done and getting ready to leave. I get up and prepare to leave as well. I reach the door first, she is just behind, and I hold the door for her and ask what she was studying. She takes out the earphones and answers Microbiology, showing me the book. I wish her good-luck, she says thanks, and along the court yard rushes the blonde iPod microbiologist girl to meet her friends.

“Three times Julie Delpy”. I was reading an interview that Julie Delpy gave to The Believer magazine, and I recalled seeing three films where she seems to be portraying some of her experiences, at least from my subjective perspective on the films: “Before Sunrise”, “Before Sunset” and “2 Days in Paris”. The funny stories and situations that take place in those films, mixing a girl from Paris and an American guy, are quite interesting and insightful. Can such things really happen? Did they happen to someone, to her? Well, the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, where “Before Sunset” starts, is certainly for real, and most of the stories in those films could happen to anyone. Ok, almost anyone… Anyway, it is good cinema and she certainly has acting and writing talent. Actually, I am now also remembering a short appearance that she had in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, where she dumps Bill Murray (another American).

“No flash photography, when the train enters the station”, barks the loudspeaker in the Leicester Square tube station, to warn tourists. Inside the train, one can observe the characteristic melting pot which is London. An African girl moves her head at the rhythm of whatever is passing in her headphones, while a Chinese couple discusses quietly close to her. Two British Chelsea supporters eyeball several Arsenal fans across the seats (was there a game today?), and some Pakistanis eat something from a take away recipient. At the middle of the train several Spanish tourists struggle with tube and city maps to figure their way out to the hotel. In the seats close to me young French women pack several shopping bags speaking loudly while some other Asian looking customers try to enter the train, which finally starts moving again. We all suffer from the high temperature in the packed train even if the wind is now flowing in through the moving windows. No air conditioned in the trains for the melting pot yet, but this seems perfectly fine for the young London girls that get out into the night in Covent Garden with high heels and little clothing on.

The lady detectives of Alexander Mccall Smith and Laurie King. You certainly would not like to miss the stories of the 1^st (actually number one!) detective agency in Botswana, imagined by Mccall Smith, or the adventures of the tenants of number 44 Scotland Street in Edinburgh. But interestingly, it was the calm stories featuring Isabel Dalhousie that most captured my attention. Isabel, who is quite wealthy, goes through life editing an academic journal on ethics, solving the odd mystery in Edinburgh, getting a younger partner, and a child, while voicing to us her inner thoughts and doubts in a very philosophical and appealing way. Naturally, credit must be awarded to the author of this almost true fictional setting. Odd enough, but in a good way, at least from my perspective, King also shares with us the adventures of another lady detective, Mary Russell in the London of the 1920s. Interestingly, the young lady, also quite wealthy by heritage, goes through meeting an old, almost retired, Sherlock Holmes, saving his life at one point, partnering with him not only to solve mysteries but also in life. Naturally, more female detectives are out there, doing their job, but Isabel and Mary seem to have a grace of their own.

Hitchcock, Jacobs, van Hamme. Alfred Hitchcock made in 1935 a rather remarkable film, still in England, where Robert Donat drags Madeleine Carroll in his attempt to escape a false accusation and his pursuers, both the law and foremost the unfriendly bad guys. It was “The Thirty-nine Steps”. The film includes some catching scenes, for instance, the escape with both main characters hand-cuffed. In the film the bad guys chase the heroes in the Scottish mountainous outdoors. It is almost mandatory to remember such environment when reading the first post Edgar Pierre Jacobs full instalment of Blake and Mortimer, delivered by Ted Benoit and Jean van Hamme in 1996, “L’ Affaire Francis Blake”. It is probably pointless to recall the importance of Jacobs in the Belgium and French comics (i.e. Bande Dessinée, BD), who stands side by side with Hergé, Uderzo, Goscinny and Franquin, just to mention some examples. Anyway, coming to the point, when van Hamme puts Jacobs’ heroes in the Scottish landscape, also to some extent running from danger, and with a girl playing also a relevant role in the story (something that Jacobs never did), the link to some particular segments in Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps” is quite well succeeded. Naturally, being Jean van Hamme one of the most experienced and successful plot-writers of the French-Belgium BD industry, one should not really be surprised by the quality of the book they managed to deliver. Both Hitchcock and Jacobs would most likely enjoy the nice match of the wrongly accused man story line pitch and the successful recreation of Blake and Mortimer universe. Subsequent books of Blake and Mortimer, notably with a different author-duo, struggled somehow to match the quality of “L’ Affaire Francis Blake”. The same goes for remakes and movies inspired on Hitch’s most wellknown films, but that’s another story.

Angelin Preljocaj, Snow White, Michael Powell. The 7 dwarfs coming out of holes in the wall, suspended in lines, like spiders, is a powerful image in Preljocaj Snow White’ s Ballet. However, it is the image of the Queen dancing initially in high heels and wearing a Jean-Paul Gaultier dress that mostly entices the viewers. One really enjoys everything in the Ballet but the character of the Queen is one notch up there, together with her two “cats”. Another catching point is the end of the Ballet when the Queen has to walk over the burning ashes. The message is visually conveyed by giving her two red shoes. Yes, for all you movie buffs out there, one cannot avoid bringing to mind Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Red Shoes. In both cases, the Queen in Preljocaj‘s Snow White cannot stop dancing (jumping around), while in Red Shoes whoever puts on the crimson ballet slippers is also compelled to dance forever. Such was indeed the fate of Moira Shearer in the fabulous 1948 film and of Céline Galli (in the version I saw) in the 2008 Preljocaj inspired choreography.

Keynes, Ideology, Pragmatism. In the 1990s the idea (or ideology) of letting the markets regulate themselves flourished. Alongside, travelled the belief that the size of the government should be contained, favouring a smaller public sector as the obvious thing to pursue. It was also interesting to observe the fashionable idea of the “expectational view of fiscal policy”. In other words, if cuts in government spending appear to the public as a serious attempt to reduce the public sector financing needs, there may be an induced wealth effect, leading to an increase in private consumption (the hypothesis being that citizens would expect fewer taxes in the future, so they could save less today and spend more today as well). In addition, the reduction of the government borrowing requirements diminishes the risk premium associated with government debt, contributes to reduce real interest rates, and crowds-in private investment. This would be the best of the worlds.

Interestingly, the possibility of the existence of expansionary fiscal consolidations had already been echoed in the so-called “German perspective” of fiscal consolidations, expressed in 1981 by the German Council of Economic Experts, while two economists, Hellwig and Neumann, also gave it a strong push in a paper published in Economic Policy in 1987. Such view would afterwards have an influence on the fiscal convergence criteria of the Maastricht Treaty, and on the underpinnings of the Stability Pact in Europe, calling for discipline of public accounts as a precondition for stable economic growth. We would be then in a world of “expansionary fiscal consolidations” and non-Keynesian effects. Sorry about that John Maynard, I bet you didn’t thought of this one during your times of Bedford Square, while strolling around Bloomsbury.

Being applied economists keen on gathering data and in trying to validate hypothesis, that’s what they did. Unfortunately, like almost everything in life, you have opposing opinions and results, and you can find your Keynesian effect as well as your non-Keynesian outcome. Funny enough, someone referred to this idea of expansionary fiscal consolidations as something that may occur if two conditions are met: i) the study is done by Italian economists, and ii) the study is about Nordic countries! I would not go that far, but it seems that a pragmatic approach to policy making is in order, cutting a fine balance between Keynes and liberal ideology. The simple, somewhat demagogical and simple query is: do we want to pay taxes to finance minimum subsistence social networks or to bail out private business, as for instance in the financial hiccups of 2008? In the end, and after full consideration, pragmatism should help and prevail when dealing with this “small” economics-market problem of allowing past private profits to become current public losses. Of course, that little thing of non-Keynesian effects and small government seems to have been kind of flushed away… At some point one wonders whether the best policy conclusions and advice are indeed the more solid ones or just the ones that were more convincingly argued in front of the right audience.