Ground Floor: A few weeks ago I read Stephen Hawking's A Briefer History of Time. I did, in fact, read the original, much longer version, a few years ago but got somewhat tied up in String Theory and struggled with the concept that time passes more quickly at higher altitudes.
I can't honestly say that I managed to nail String Theory on this occasion either but I did finally get my head around time being a flexible concept.
Maybe that was because it's easier to understand the older you get, since time certainly seems to clip along at an accelerated rate with every passing year.
A lot of my time when I was doing the bond trading thing was caught up in looking at graphs. These graphs were a snapshot of prices over a period of time too.
And, of course, the longer the period of time the graph covered, the more likely it was that something which had seemed a catastrophic event in the short term was nothing more than a blip when viewed from a 30-year perspective.
That's why financial advisors tell us to look at our investments over the longer term.
Anyway, what we have to decide in Ireland is whether the 10-year boom is a blip, or whether, when the economic graph is being looked at 50 years from now, the preceding depression was the short-term problem.
Obviously, when you lived through the '70s and '80s when jobs were hard to come by and the bank manager was someone to whom you went in pleading mode rather than someone who desperately wanted to lend you money, it's hard to accept your daily grind was a blip.
But today, living in a demand driven economy (despite the fact that much of the driving force in demand comes from a consumer base where year-on-year credit growth has reached 30 per cent) we are, by and large, having the time of our lives.
In time honoured tradition, the man and I threw our lot in with Mammon and decided to hit the January sales (although these are now starting earlier and earlier so that one day we'll find that they've been renamed the winter sales and they'll begin in October).
As a refugee from the bad old days of rampant inflation and repressed consumer demand, I feel almost obliged to keep the economic bandwagon rolling although, to be perfectly honest, I'm not in the Colleen McLoughlin league when it comes to retail therapy.
Nevertheless we trekked into the city centre where the man thought that the shops weren't as crowded as they had been in other years, and then we headed to the high-temple of consumerism, the Dundrum Town Centre where it was very crowded indeed.
Maybe it's just a southside thing, but everyone in Dundrum was already wearing the latest designer garb as they flitted from shop to shop and made their way directly to new collections rather than last year's marked down clothes.
Why shouldn't we go straight to the new collections to confirm our optimism about the year ahead? Forecasts for the world economy are almost uniformly positive.
Estimated US growth of 3.5 per cent last year might not be as spectacular as our 5 per cent, but the bonuses were good on Wall Street in 2005 and surveys show that businesses are planning to increase capital spending by around 9 per cent in 2006.
The euro zone and the UK may be lagging behind somewhat (and the possibility of higher interest rates may make some people more defensive) but stock markets did well and there is evidence that, finally, Old Europe is getting to grips with some of the outdated work practices that have led it to be pushed aside by emergent economies.
The leader of the pack, of course, is still China. Recent reports state that authorities underestimated growth by omitting to include the services sector, which increased the headline figure from 9.4 per cent to 9.8 per cent. This means that China has replaced Italy as the world's sixth largest economy. With that kind of growth spurring on the rest of the world, there has to be continued optimism for the 12 months ahead, even outside Ireland!
At home the skyline continues to be dominated by cranes as our love affair with property shows no signs of abating. And the influx of cash that will begin to hit the economy when the first of the SSIAs start to mature should mean that our love affair with consumer goods won't abate either.
There is, of course, always the cataclysmic unexpected - the financial scandal, the act of God or the latest energy crisis. The impact can be sharp in the immediate aftermath. But we've managed to contain all of these events over the last couple of years.
Which means that we may have still more time to think of new ways of increasing our wealth in the year ahead, more time to invest in a myriad of asset classes or more time to simply spend our earnings.
Of course a lot of that thinking time will probably be spent in traffic jams on the M50. And if you were to graph that on your personal life chart it'd be a fairly substantial blip.
