Walking through Barnsley on Christmas Eve, it was hard to believe the place is one of the most economically-deprived in England.
Its traditional industry - coal - is long gone, so Barnsley had to resort to the public sector to keep its head above water. The coalition government's marriage of convenience, though, and the attendant decision to scale back the size of the state, means that this little revival is in imminent danger of being nipped firmly in the bud.
Indeed, several hundred civil servants in Barnsley have been given the festive news that their jobs are being sacrificed in the name of Con-Dem ideology. The letters landed on their doormats just in time for Christmas.
You wouldn't have known it, though, as last-minute shoppers queued out into the streets, thronged around the forty-quid-a-pop perfume stall in the Alhambra, and buses in and out of town necessitated intimate standing room-only proximity with the next passenger.
It occurred to me, then, that just as we are beginning to question the capitalist model and the set of forces and beliefs which sustain it, it proves itself yet again with flying colours.
I had imagined it was the first signs of a terminal illness when Lehman Brothers went kaput, when the venerable old Woolworths was put out of its misery, when suspicious Sheffielders clamoured to pull their savings out of Northern Rock.
It turned out to be nothing more than a sniffle, though. Even in austerity, the presumed or invented birth of Jesus relieves us of much of whatever money's left. When a test of the capitalists' strength is required, it passes every time.
(With a sense of disappointment in myself, I confess to producing these words on a state-of-the-art mobile phone. There was bugger all wrong with my old one, but better was available , so I disabused myself of it. What a laugh - as I express my frustration at the prevailing norms, I am blown along by them, and my trajectory is something shiny, exciting, different.)
I have identified the condition by which capitalism continues to propagate itself - when it is weak, challenge it, and see if it, in its malaise, is nevertheless stronger than its pretenders.
Thus we are akin to scientists in the middle of a paradigm shift. We know that what we've got has run its course, for it no longer fits the experimental data, but for all that, it remains our best effort. Until something testably superior emerges, we are stuck with it, and so we plod on unhappily for years, knowing that by which we live is broken, its apparatus defunct.
Sometimes love is like this too: prove yourself to me, I cry. What is this made of? Show me at once, lover, scientist, money-man, else I shall tip you overboard, you and yours. One false move and you aren't dead, not yet anyway, but the idea that there could be a break with you one day has been considered for the first time.
