End of the world, by other means; is Jonny Wilkinson the saviour?

Apocalypse – once it was carbon-pumping evil industry’s fault, now it’s down to lending by evil banks. The shift has been from climatic to economic, as represented by HBO’s new series Americatown, originally intended as a saga of immigration in New York, now repurposed as a musing on total US economic collapse and ensuing mass migration. (Think American Chinatowns in every far flung capital, can Britain be far behind? Imagine that, the British quarter in Paris – all greasy chip shops, booze-soaked bars and equestrian shops. I suppose the equivalent already exists across Spain, in the guise of expat communities.)

Britain, meanwhile, is ‘Broken’, according to both Noel Edmonds and The Sun (but not Gordon Brown). The second, smaller leg of Noel’s recent resurgence rests upon his various projects at Sky1, the parent company of which of course, owns The Sun – Broken Britain is clearly a common theme for both of them, and trips of the tongue rather nicely. ‘Slightly misshapen Britain’, ‘Sprained Britain’, or ‘Damaged Britain’ don’t work quite as well. One imagines these were thrashed through in short order at an editorial conference; the beauty of broken is its close association to fix (‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’), on which Noel and his redtop ally are both keen to wax. Even Richard and Judy are getting in on the act. In these troubled times, it’s nice to celebrate the nice; as long as no-one is exploited, who can argue with that?

So far left in the cold by Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire, a nonetheless resurgent British Conservative party has developed its own particular take on the problem – David Cameron pledged to mend Britain’s ‘broken society’. Similar, yet different. Whatever their aspirations to broad-based support, the Conservatives probably think themselves a little above alliteration. He was later forced to clarify, claiming that he only meant ‘parts of Britain’ were broken; akin to a human breaking an arm or a leg, perhaps – it would not naturally follow that the entire person was broken. Does Mr Cameron believe that partially disabled people are broken? Does he have an axe to grind against paraplegics? We should be told, certainly before the paralympics. Perhaps he has some horrible plan up his sleeve.

Amid all these differing versions of looming apocalypse and its varying solutions, there lies the path taken by Jonny Wilkinson – drifting between injuries once again, the once-prolific goalkicker appears to be beating the hippy trail, taking the path to enlightenment through Buddhism via quantum physics, and wearing his hair long. How long before he fronts a documentary explaining the discipline, or writes an illustrated pop-up book on the Large Hadron Collider? One for the Christmas list, that.