Friday, April the 11th, 2008

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Neglected Crunches

There is much in the news these days about the credit crunch, but this should not lead us to neglect many other important crunches. I sometimes worry that less attention is paid to some crunches because they lack the alliterative quality of the credit crunch, which of course makes it a favourite of headline writers and broadcasters. Actually, it's not quite true that I “sometimes” worry about this. If truth be told, my fretfulness about neglected crunches is starting to consume my every waking thought. Yesterday, for example, I was standing upon a bridge, staring off into the distance, buffeted by a gale, and all I could think of was the fact that the credit crunch is pushing some of my preferred crunches off the front pages. I don't have any useful media connections—or, to be more precise, my people don't have any connections with their people—so it's not as if I can just send a few metal tapping machine messages to selected newspaper crunch reporters and put pressure on them to cover other crunches. Would that I could! What I did instead, yesterday, was to trudge disconsolately home and to spend a fruitful few hours studying Pebblehead's bestselling paperback The Bumper Book Of Crunches. I can recommend this fantastic, and very fat, book to anyone who seeks to broaden their knowledge beyond the credit crunch. It is packed with crunch-related facts, anecdotage, illustrations, diagrams, and even its very own cleverly-crafted crunchiness.