Darn it!  I'll have to think again.  I thought the headphone covers would accessorise well with the red pyjamas. 
 

Hmm.  Should we be stock-piling tins, powdered milk and stuff do you think? 

'Should' is a bit prescriptive, Milly; but on the specific question of how to protect you and yours from hunger, I'd say it's a cast-iron certainty that stockpiling food will be more effective than stockpiling money.  At last the pundits are getting round to saying what I've been saying for years  - and even mentioned on this board a few weeks ago:  attempting to save the financial institutions might simply result in the currency going the same way as the banks.  It won't matter whether or not you have access to your money because it won't buy anything.....


....and this process is already well under way for those of us with savings.  As Mary observes, the time to spend it was long ago.  To be honest, I'm really not taken with the offerings of consumer society - well not retail consumer society anyway: I spend a fair bit on travel & live entertainment but I often trawl the shops armed with a fully-loaded debit card and come back with nothing because I really can't see anything I can be bothered with.  If I'm honest, that - and not any personal virtue - is probably why I have savings in the first place.  And, of course, it's a luxury to be so spoilt for choice when one thinks of those in real poverty. 

Me neither. I have a weakness for computer, audio and photographic gear but otherwise I'm not interested. My cooker and fridge both date from 1973 and my washing machine from about 1982. But my vacuum cleaner beats all of those, it used to belong to my grandmother! Looking round the furniture in my computer room, the table I'm sitting at now cost me £10 from a library at Birmingham Uni but everything else was given to me.

From Robert Peston's blog (BBC business editor):

I've also been musing on the historic significance of tonight's events, and I think it can perhaps be seen as the death of Thatcherism, or at least of an important strand of the dominant ideology of the 1980s and 1990s.

It was Margaret Thatcher who in a series of bold reforms from 1979 onwards gave the City the freedom to trade in everything and anything.

She removed restrictive practices, she encouraged the free flow of capital to and from anywhere in the world, she created the notion of the City as the Great British Success.

For the liberalisation of the City to end with a quartet of our biggest and proudest banks being forced to put out the begging bowl to Government, well that is a moment in ecnomic history - which may well, ultimately, be as significant as the nationalisations of the 1940s and the privatisations of the 1980s.

If Thatcher isn't actually dead yet, can we help her on her way?

Another scene of fat cat depravity. You'll be amongst the first to go, Bryn. Your day of reckoning is coming.