OH wanted to go out for a walk today but the weather was so foul -- cold, drizzly, at times hail that drifted white in the garden -- it's not even November yet! What sort of winter are we going to get?? -- that I begged off and said I'd prefer to saw the green hazel branches from February and from our last coppicing outing into stove-sized logs, and do so in the heated shed at the bottom of our garden. I loaded up the handcart with what was still stacked in our driveway, dragged it down the makeshift ramp and to the "poolhouse", threw the wood onto an untidy pile inside, set up my laptop to streaming the Max Keiser Report non-stop, and started sawing.
By sunset, and 3 cups of tea later, I had learnt that the global financial system would definitely collapse in a heap of digital ones and zeroes by April 2013 at the very latest and that the Germans would discover that most of their 3,000 tons worth of so-far-never-audited physical gold holdings in vaults across the "trusted" allies of the Western world will have disappeared, been reallocated, tungstened or replaced by bonds, or a pumpkin. Classic, I thought, sawing through a particularly thick and tough ash log, it would be like the Germans to be the first of the big players to call time on this 30-year-long game of Fiat Money Musical Chairs -- and pull their hard assets out before anyone else sits on them. Never mind that gold is forever tainted as an ethical store of value -- the merciless tithing of the peasantry throughout the Middle Ages, the systematic robbery and extermination of South Americans, of European Jews, the dreadful exploitation of miners. You come between a German and their gold hoard at your peril. Watch the political leverage from 70 years of world-war-guilt-tripping vaporise inside a week when the German public find out "their" gold has gone. Watch them collectively go Gollum: "We wants it, we needs it. Must have the precious. They stole it from us." It will not be pretty.
Seriously, I thought, as Keiser quacked on about how clever German financial strategising would leave them the rulers of Europe, why would he assume that a sovereign demanding their gold back from a rented foreign vault would not have seniority over some other hedge fund claim? But maybe that's what Keiser and Stoneleigh and all the other deflationists, Peak Cheap Oilers, Kondratieff Wavers and Minsky Momenters mean: all it takes is someone to call out the whole overleveraged, rehypothecated charade -- and grab all the tangible wealth there is first, and the whole house of cards goes down as everyone scrambles frantically for what they think is theirs but which has also been promised to lots of other people about 300 times over.
In any case, my precious is now seasoning quietly down the back of the shed, in the dry, hopefully dropping its moisture content from currently 38% to about 20% when we can burn it without it creosoting the chimney. I can't see roving gangs torturing us for it, should the Great Reset happen. By the end of the day, I had about three quarters of a cubic metre of greenwood logs of varying sizes -- for free, the result of only 1 full day of coppicing. Seasoned, it would represent a value of roughly £50 and keep us warm for approximately 2 weeks. And more will be added this winter. I expect to pull about 2 cbm, possibly more, out of the woods this year.
Dinner was a lovely fish pie prepared by OH, followed by knitting in front of a roaring fire and Bella Block, a slow-moving German crime series for grown-ups, gently lubricated by OH's spirits (last night: ginger liqueur and beechleaf noyau).
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