Archive for December, 2005

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

This is one of the few Bible parables I remember from school. The image jumped – or rather waddled – out of the page at me.

In the 1950s and 1960s, black Americans moved into the middle classes at a rate not experienced before or since. When seen though the lens of 1967, it would have been logical to foresee the American black future as a middle-class one, as represented by The Cosby Show, Toni Morrison and Condoleezza Rice. Yet it did not turn out like that.

Brian Cowen would look great with a soft perm, don’t you think? He would cut a dash in a pair of bottle green, high-waist parallels or snugly fitted into a Bay City Rollers bomber jacket.

In 1990, the Central Bank’s entire economic fraternity crammed into a small office and giddily jotted down figures to assess the impact of the various numbers pronounced by the minister for finance.