The news breaks an hour later. I’m listening to the radio, which not many people do any more but I do. The whole thing happens slowly and calmly, as if we were all just waiting for this moment. Another banking crisis? Feh. Who cares? How much worse can it get? We knew that the British housing bubble was unsustainable, again. We knew that food bonds were a shitty idea, again. We knew that the Chinese were propping up the dollar and couldn’t do it for ever, that the renminbi was still unnaturally restrained, that Congress was screwing with the debt ceiling, again. We knew our mistakes weren’t going away, that we were sailing in a kettle with an ever-increasing number of holes in it, and that the patches themselves would sooner or later drag us down into the deep blue water. It was only a question of which ridiculous, pusillanimous choice would be the one to make it happen. But we hadn’t realised, even I hadn’t realised, even with all I knew, even I didn’t consider that all that finance crap meant something very practical. Six months ago the government finally privatised the water utilities in Greece. Today it turns out that the companies that bought them cannot pay the workers, or for the purchase of electricity to desalinate and purify. Water will be rationed from tonight, in the summer heat, an absurdly small amount per person per day may be drawn from the tap. There is no way to control usage by home or even by street. Who you have to trust depends entirely on the random roving of the mains beneath the streets, a network that ignores social niceties of class and wealth. In a better world it would be—ho ho ho—a watershed moment for the city, even the country. We’d pull together. People would talk about the moment when Athens shared its cups for a hundred years, and we’d emerge new-made as a nation of parts. That would be a world without television talk shows. Not one of them bothers with such a milk dream. Instead they call whoever can be most eloquently hateful and put them all together on a blue leather sofa. Great TV ensues, fisticuffs and rabble-rousing. "You foreign scroungers are taking our water!" I make a note that I must buy any stations that are for sale and arrange to have all the producers fired.