Giuliano: Oh, sister, did you see my cloak? Bianca: Not I, I see none. Giuliano: God's life, I have lost it then

This would require discarding the extreme Japanophobia that characterises the so-called “revisionists” who are really “regressionists” twice over.

Economics is a messy discipline: too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art. Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too. GDP measures the total value of output in an economic territory. Its apparent simplicity explains why it is scrutinised down to tenths of a percentage point every month.

So for two days we sit right in front of the wood stove waiting for our bellies to unbloat so we can stuff them again.