It isn't as if I could have affected it in one way or the other. Moreover, newspapers these days, which cannot compete with the immediacy of the electronic media, devote more and more of their space to the future than to the past: what might happen, what might not happen, what must happen, what mustn't happen, what can happen, what can't happen. What actually did happen is by comparison now of small account.

I know that the crisis affects the real lives of millions of Greeks, who used to make a decent living by recycling the money obtained from loans (as millions of the British still do), but I cannot help thinking that the best way of conceptualizing the Greek debt crisis is as a soap opera. It has been going on for ages, it has its ups and downs, it has its heroes and villains, every episode ends on a high point of tension until the next, which always starts anticlimactically, and there is no end in sight. There is melodrama, tragedy, farce.