WITH concern focused upon the economic slowdown, woefully little attention is now being paid to the runaway acceleration of time, a problem that few readers will have failed to notice.

There can be little doubt that it will soon be 2009, and it may already be too late to prevent 2010 and 2011 following with sickening rapidity, although some may still pretend to find this view alarmist. We are faced with the prospect of large-scale loss of life, particularly affecting those whose number is up in these years.

Nor does any of us have room for complacency. There are strong indications that, barring some dramatic intervention, 2100 is now closer than anyone would previously have thought possible. And, as Keynes so cheerfully observed, in the long run we are all dead.

Fortunately, our economic and temporal crises have at least one important feature in common.

They each depend for their solution upon the mobilisation of a massive collective conscious effort of will. I am confident that, if the Government is able effectively to tackle one, then it is likely also to prove capable of resolving the other.

John Riseley, Harrogate.