The Impossible Has Happened

This week: on the plausibility of the once unthinkable, and the impossibility of housing.

I have no idea what the weather was like in this country in the summer of 1914, but every reenactment I have ever seen portrays it as glorious sunshine: it’s always a perfect British summer, overcast unexpectedly by the arrival of war. 

It’s symbolic sunshine, of course. For nearly a century after 1815 – in marked contrast to the century that preceded it – Europe had been, broadly, at peace, and what eruptions there were had mostly felt comfortingly far away from these shores. The reason the events of 1914 still haunt our national psyche more than a century on is not merely thanks to the horrors of the First World War, but because those horrors came out of a metaphorical clear blue sky. It’s a reminder that, just occasionally, the unthinkable can happen. 

Checking out the headlines this week, a lot of recently unthinkable things suddenly seem to have been unnervingly thinkable. Most unnerving of the lot must be the way security experts are spending so much time discussing how seriously we should take Vladimir Putin’s not infrequent reminders that Russia still has nukes. But neither you nor I have any idea what to do with that except gibber, so let’s move on.

Meanwhile, interest rates are rising across the world and the British economy is facing what is, by my count, its fourth entirely unprecedented crisis in a little under 15 years. Suddenly the media is awash with reports that house prices are overvalued by a third, and might now face that big a drop. I don’t know if that’s true, or whether it would be an entirely bad thing if it were. But again: an event many people have long assured themselves is impossible has suddenly started to seem entirely plausible.

Two stories from the same day in September. Er, is this good?

A cheerier example of the genre is to be found in the many polls floating around which suggest that the Tory party will not merely lose the next election, but could effectively be wiped out.