Actually, it was while sitting at Ciampino in February reading the worthy but dull International Herald Tribune that I realised that Old Europe’, to use Donald Rumsfeld’s apt phrase, was doomed economically. I’d thought this for some time but when I read that the EU Commission had decided that airlines should pay compensation to passengers for certain delayed or cancelled flights I had to conclude that the Eurozone had had it. The overstaffed, subsidised national carriers such as Air France don’t care, but the budget airlines will have to pay compensation far exceeding the actual prices of their fares. My last two flights from Bournemouth were each £74 return for two people inclusive, a tremendous bargain. Passengers realise that they will have to pay higher fares as a result, which is why most are against the idea. It shows how utterly silly and ignorant the Eurocrats are about the nature of business.

Talking of economic narcolepsy, in England my nearest town is Shaftesbury in Dorset - Thomas Hardy’s Shaston, of course. It’s attractive in an unpretentious way and I’m very fond of it. Although it’s sharpened up a bit in some respects, it’s still quite unambitious at heart. I’ve long felt that Thatcherism whizzed down the A303 and missed this corner of north Dorset. A friend asked the owner of a small garage outside the town to fill up her large estate car with petrol. When he’d finished he said in a broad Dorset accent, ‘I haven’t filled it right up, it’ll cost a fortune.’ When she wanted to buy a plastic container for lawnmower fuel, he looked aghast and suggested she return home to bring her existing one as ‘these are a hell of a price’. She was allowed one after pretending that the container in her garage was punctured. A young mother trying to buy her daughter shoes for school last September saw them cordoned off in the shop like a police crime scene with the sign, ‘No school shoes available in the school holidays.’ She could only have them after her daughter had gone back to school. Yes, they definitely like the quiet life down here. Or have they got the life/work balance right? Tourists arrive on summer Sundays to gape at Gold Hill, the steep cobbled street where the Hovis commercials were shot, and to walk past the ruins of the 9th-century Benedictine abbey founded by King Alfred with its lovely views across the Blackmore Vale. They tend to find, though, that most of the shops where they might actually want to buy something are resolutely and triumphantly shut. I call it the curse of Shaftesbury and it can strike wherever I am in the world.