Anatole Kaletsky is always worth reading (even if he always delivers his copy 10 minutes after the absolute, final deadline) – here’s his take on the economics of 2006.

Combining these three negative factors, a significant global slowdown in the year ahead seems almost certain. But a mid-cycle slowdown is very different from a late-cycle downturn of the kind that presages outright recession. In the case of Britain, which was the first of the major economies to tighten monetary policy and experience a slowdown, the worst may already be over. Assuming the Bank of England reduces base rates to around 4 per cent by late summer, I would expect a return to trend growth of around 2.5 per cent and a stable housing market this year.

So not too bad for the UK, but I’d be more worried in the US – which matches my entirely lay view – those deficits have got to bite at some time.

Unfortunately, however, for the environment it is almost certain to be another bad year. Today’s news: fires and record temperatures in Sydney, and the biggest whale slaughter in a generation.

Traditionalists often complain of the lack of craft in modern art, yet the photographer Tom Hunter, in his composition and use of light, shows an equivalent level of skill to any “Old Master” with horsehair brush and oils. There is something astonishingly painterly about his work with a lens.

It is thus something of a shock to come suddenly upon his show at the National Gallery. Walking into the Sunley room, your gaze is attracted by the distant prospect – several galleries on – of Van Dyck’s famous giant equestrian portrait of Charles I. Then you look left, to an image that seems very familiar; a young woman stands holding a letter in the light of a window.

Looking closer, you realise that while you might well have seen it before, this is not the familiar Vermeer painting, but Hunter’s Woman reading a Possession Order, which was modelled on it. Made in 1997, and winner of the Kobal Photographic Portrait Award the following year, it is a highly accessible, yet highly effective, image. Instead of the rich bourgeois setting of the original, this is a dilapidated Hackney room, and beside the woman is not a bundle of richly embroidered cloth but a baby, who looks anxiously at his straight-backed mother, who is carefully holding herself together. READ MORE

Now here’s some depressing news …

Two Booker novels, submitted anonymously and unidentified to publishers and agents, got almost universal rejections. As someone who refers to JK Rowling getting six rejections just a little too often, I’m not surprised.

Then, if you’re suffering from New Year-itis you mightn’t want to read this one: if you’re British you probably noticed that story about the single mother of five who died by “falling out of the loft while getting her children’s presents”. You have to wonder why that story was allowed to run in that form (surely an off-the-record word from a policeman would have stopped it … then again perhaps not, given the desperation for a story), because it looks like it is much darker – a case of suicide.

Then, one of my predictions for 2006 – we’ll see a lot more attacks from the “old” media on the “new”, like this:

There’s something frankly creepy about the explosion we now call the Blogosphere — the big-bang “electroniverse,” where recently wired squatters set up new camps each day. As I write, the number of “blogs” (Web logs) and “bloggers” (those who blog) is estimated in the tens of millions worldwide.
Although I’ve been a blog fan since the beginning, and have written favorably about the value added to journalism and public knowledge thanks to the new “citizen journalist,” I’m also wary of power untempered by restraint and accountability.
Say what you will about the so-called mainstream media, but no industry agonizes more about how to improve its product, police its own members and better serve its communities. Newspapers are filled with carpal-tunneled wretches, overworked and underpaid, who suffer near-pathological allegiance to getting it right.

Well except in sentimental, and unfactual, Christmas stories …