So there is to be a ‘bloodbath in the city’. Wandsworth Reservoir Dogs? – is Tarantino in town? Perhaps there’s a Charles Bronson convention in Liverpool Street? Or a Grand Theft Auto 5 tournament at the Barbican? God forbid, but maybe we’re talking the real tragic McCoy – some loonie with a shot gun or another dumb terrorist. But no: the tabloids and even some of the more respectable titles are referring to job losses.......

‘Credit crunch’ is surely the front-runner for phrase of the year. The long and tortured story of how iffy loans turned into high-rated assets and then turned into dust has been well-covered elsewhere. But has it affected anybody other than City bankers and the head of Merrill Lynch? The way to tell if the crunch has really trickled down to street level is to find out if people who previously had little trouble getting......