Skip to main content

A chill wind

Tonight in Tallinn is set to be one of the coldest nights so far: minus 24 Celsius.

In fact it has not been above -14 for a while now. Personally I prefer it like this than when it is around freezing point, because there is no damp in the air, so it feels drier. Not to mention the fact that every day has begun with a beautiful clear sunrise and with the sun on the frost, the days are bright and cheerful.

We have some snow forecast in the middle of next week, but I will be back for a few days in London and Paris, so hopefully will miss this and the -6 associated with snow.

It is certainly true that you adjust your frame of reference quite quickly: once upon a time I would have considered -6 to be quite cold!

However, despite the cold, there have been three separate reports today that confirm that Estonia is on track to enter the Eurozone on January 1st 2011. It looks like we have finally struggled through our economic winter. Christmas tourism is up sharply on this time last year. The economy is out of recession. Finally, the place is looking up.

Meanwhile I shall go cross country skiing tomorrow in the bright sunshine. The chill wind is blowing this country some good.

Comments

Manfarang said…
Well its 33 Celsius in Bangkok and the tourism is up on this time last year.

Popular posts from this blog

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop

Media misdirection

In the small print of the UK budget we find that the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the British Finance Minister) has allocated a further 15 billion Pounds to the funding for the UK track and trace system. This means that the cost of the UK´s track and trace system is now 37 billion Pounds.  That is approximately €43 billion or US$51 billion, which is to say that it is amount of money greater than the national GDP of over 110 countries, or if you prefer, it is roughly the same number as the combined GDP of the 34 smallest economies of the planet.  As at December 2020, 70% of the contracts for the track and trace system were awarded by the Conservative government without a competitive tender being made . The program is overseen by Dido Harding , who is not only a Conservative Life Peer, but the wife of a Conservative MP, John Penrose, and a contemporary of David Cameron and Boris Johnson at Oxford. Many of these untendered contracts have been given to companies that seem to have no notewo

Bournemouth absence

Although I had hoped to get down to the Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth this year, simple pressure of work has now made that impossible. I must admit to great disappointment. The last conference before the General Election was always likely to show a few fireworks, and indeed the conference has attracted more headlines than any other over the past three years. Some of these headlines show a significant change of course in terms of economic policy. Scepticism about the size of government expenditure has given way to concern and now it is clear that reducing government expenditure will need to be the most urgent priority of the next government. So far it has been the Liberal Democrats that have made the running, and although the Conservatives are now belatedly recognising that cuts will be required they continue to fail to provide even the slightest detail as to what they think should guide their decisions in this area. This political cowardice means that we are expected to ch