Tuesday 21 July 2009

Out of the swimming pool, into the fire ...

Thanks to everybody who voted here.

To summarise, sixty-eight per cent of us learned to swim doing doggy-paddle or breaststroke (which is what I'd have expected from the readers of a middle-aged 'blog such as this) and only eleven per cent learned front crawl first. I know for a fact that my Dad taught me and my sisters to swim using breast stroke (oh come off it, no sniggering at the back) on holiday in 1973, and swimming lessons at school seemed to revolve around this (with or without floats). Front crawl was just for the show-offs and athletic kids. But we dutifully take our two young kids to swimming lessons on Sunday morning and they focus on front crawl, which seems a bit counter-intuitive to me, seeing as it pre-supposes confidence, strength and actually knowing what you're doing. Ah well.

This week's Fun Online Poll: "What weighs more heavily on the next generation - £1 trillion-plius of public sector debt or £1 trillion-plus of mortgage debt?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

6 comments:

Curmudgeon said...

What about those of us who never learned to swim at all?

Incidentally, if you can't swim, you're much less likely to die by drowning, which goes against one of the reasons often advanced for teaching children to swim.

John B said...

The logic in the new poll is slightly wrong - "Nothing to worry about. They owe it to the older generation." is entirely true *except for* net external debt, which is the only number that's actually worth worrying about.

In a closed economy, private sector savings = private sector debt + net public sector debt. That's all money that we-as-the-UK really have; the distribution isn't particularly important.

In the current economy, there's the addition of external savings (my Euro account with Santander) and foreign debt (China buying a billion quid of government bonds). Most of the really scary numbers that've been published for the UK take the latter and ignore the former - but the relevant figure is the net one. That's 'how much money we as a country have spent that we haven't earned'.

So it's annoying that there aren't any regularly published figures (that I've been able to find) for net UK external debt...

subrosa said...

Thank goodness for such results. I no longer feel like the only doggy paddler in the whole world.

Mark Wadsworth said...

JohnB, AFAIAA, net external debt is in the order of £700 billion. But does it make any difference to the borrower to whom he owes it? I'd guess most households owe money to the bank, that's what concerns them - the fact that the bank is in hock to Johnny Foreigner is a different issue.

Subrosa, you seem to be in the majority, actually.

Stan said...

Doggy paddle for me - but that was quickly followed by front crawl and backstroke. I also managed butterfly at grammar school - one of only three in my year who could, but I'm darned if I can do it now! I can breast stroke, but choose not to - it's for girls who don't want to get their hair wet.

RantinRab said...

To be honest, I'm a terrible swimmer. I can just about, (obviously), stop myself from drowning.