Skips and new cars are a sign that economic recovery’s taking root

IF I WERE to say that Finance Minister Michael Noonan is off with his statistics on economic recovery, he would come after me and give me a black eye to match the one he’s sporting.

So I will concede that the economic evidence of recovery, cited by himself and Richard Bruton, may be valid.

But I beg leave to suggest that there are physical indicators of the end of the recession and these may be worth scrutiny.

These indicators are as joyous and random as the signs of spring they accompany. The snowdrops came first, but they have been succeeded by daffodil leaves, seen poking up out of the ground like tiny green swords. A ladybird appeared on one of the stalks in my garden.

If snowdrops, daffodils, and a ladybird are natural signs of spring, a comparable natural sign of the recession’s end is the return of the skip. Or dumpster, if you want to go American about it.

I’m not talking about those half-hearted, small versions of the skip that are little more than big square bags.

I’m talking about serious, full-size, no-messing skips, one of which I saw last week, on my way home. A huge skip, it was. Oversize, even.

And, even more to the point, this particular skip was filled to the brim with detritus.

If the traffic had not been so congested, I’d have pulled in and climbed into it, me being a card-carrying skip-scavenger. Most skips are at least half-filled with wood suitable for a wood-burning stove, although some of the planks are a bit long for stuffing into a 10-year-old Beamer.

Nor is it stealing to take as much of that wood home with you as you can carry. How could it be? The householders are so committed to getting rid of it that they’re paying a skip company to take it away, so they’re not going to get shirty if you nick some of it.

Indeed, you are freeing up space in the skip for other stuff, so you are saving them money by taking away their discarded floorboards and Bentwood chairs. It’s a win/win.

During the recession, skips went into hibernation somewhere, but they’re making a triumphant return as a non-statistical indicator of national recovery that’s nearly as probative as the increased pagination, in this and other newspapers, devoted to houses for sale and to the interior decoration possibilities implicit therein.

Lack of punctuality is another oddball indicator. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed how many people are turning up anything from 15 to 45 minutes late for appointments. They arrive in a resentful, if apologetic, flurry, caught on the hop by the fact that — according to An Garda Siochana — traffic has now slowed to rates that were standard before the meltdown.

Those who have come to terms with the growing congestion on the roads are getting up 20 minutes earlier than was required two years ago to get to work on time.

No complaints about earlier rising should be articulated. The fact that we have to abandon the bed a little earlier means that more people are at work. The rising tide lifts all beds. It does, however, demand more strategic planning.

In the worst days of the recession, going to work or even going to the supermarket didn’t require planning. Now, both do, and the car parks around supermarkets are filled with simmering people who either can’t find a spot in which to park, or, if they do find one, can’t get out of it thereafter.

On the other hand, driving around and around a carpark is much less threatening to your personal budget since the price of oil dropped. It’s no fun, but filling the tank is less painful.

Anyway, on that and other issues, we should be afraid to complain, lest we be sorely smote for not appreciating how things have improved.

It’s the same inside the supermarket. Fewer people are gathered around that shelf where the just-about-past-their-sell-by-date food is sold at reduced prices, and more people with high-piled trolleys, and longer queues at the checkouts. Be grateful for those longer queues. Be very grateful.

Facelifts are up, too. Here’s the inside story on cosmetic surgery. During the recession, facelifts went down, in the sense that the demand for expensive, radical reconstructive surgery faltered. Fillers went up.

Customers who still wanted to combat the effects of time, gravity, and recession-misery often, according to practitioners, found the money for Botox or for a bit of artificial face-stuffing.

Car sales are self-evidently up, but what’s just as significant is that ostentation-shaming has died away. For a while there, even the rich had second thoughts about Ferraris and about buying vehicles with gull-wing doors, lest their choice of vehicle indicate a disregard for the new poor.

Now, that brief onset of shame has disappeared. Not only are we seeing registration plates indicating purchase in the current year, but we’re getting the eye taken out of us by the sight of occasional cars so luxurious you want to draw level with them to find out who’s driving, in order to hate them in a more focussed way.

The funny thing is the caution we’re all showing. Every current affairs radio programme has someone warning that reckless first-time home buyers, or bankers, or the Government are creating a bubble, unless we stop them.

The implication is that we should all live on cornflakes (generic), darn our sheets (I do) and drive our cars until they get arthritis. In some unspecified way, it is assumed that by our continued financial rectitude we will demonstrate to any prospective bubble that it should bubble off.

PERHAPS because of the desire to be seen to be modest and downtrodden, people are nearly afraid to acknowledge that they are beginning to do better. One dentist, on Friday, queried about his crowded waiting room, found a delightfully cautious phrase to sum up his situation.

“We’d be tippin’ along, all right.”

You have to love the conditional tense he used. And “tippin’ along” allowed him to acknowledge an improving situation without losing the run of himself.

“How’ll you know when the recession is over for you, then?” I asked him. He gestured towards the back of his premises.

“When that empty, but fully equipped, room in the back has another dentist hard at work.”

A lot of non-medical businesses, right now, have a metaphorical empty room out the back, waiting for its chance to contribute to the bottom line. But the signs of recovery are so present, they deserve a song: ‘Cars and Skips and Cranes...’

Longer queues at the checkouts. Be grateful for those longer queues. Be very grateful.

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