Somebody told me ... that he overheard a banker's wife saying her husband was working for free this year-this was 2009. What she meant was, he was just getting his basic salary of £300,000, and no bonus. Their sense of entitlement is, in the proper sense of the word, psychotic.

It has been a masterful fight-back by the big banks. We the paying public can't do anything much except admit defeat and settle back for the next set of bills. In the meantime, perhaps, we should try and think of a name for the new economic system, which certainly isn't capitalism ... The most accurate term would probably be "bankocracy".

We wouldn't care so much what people thought of us if we knew how seldom they did.

You heard people say forty was the new thirty and fifty was the new forty and sixty was the new forty-five, but you never heard anybody say eighty was the new anything. Eighty was just eighty.

The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat.

But knowing that you had gone wrong, and knowing how you had gone wrong, were not the same thing as knowing how to put it right.

It can be a way of knowledge, a path, an inspiration, a Tao, an ordering, a memory, a fantasy, a seduction, a prayer, a summoning, an incantation murmured under the breath as the torchlights sink lower and the forest looms taller and the wolves howl louder and the fire prepares for its submission to the encroaching dark.