In the park one child squeals with delight at a plastic wheel, the other shouts as they descend slowly down the sticky yellow plastic slide. Everything here, except for the grass and the trees was probably made in china. From where I am sitting, on the brown brittling glass, I can see the way the bolts at the bottom of the slide have been driven into the ground plate.

"This is nice" she says. It's not though.

I look through the grass at the soil. I can see little fissures in it, from where the water has gone. Where something has gone, what it leaves behind can crack, and break. I do not think about how I could check my email again; instead I think, again, what the subject is likely to be. "All Staft, Important information concerning the future of X" it will say, with a little red flag, as if words were never enough.

Tonight she'll try to have it off with me, and I'll try to pretend that this isn't happening. In a sick way it will be good to get back to work 2 days from now. I'll walk into my office, wondering how many more times I'll walk through the bad glass doors in the morning, and I'll talk to our colleagues blackly about how we're to blame for the recession and we deserve all this uncertainty. All over teh UK people are doing this, fretting at bbc news headlines, checking email, worrying, looking at cracks and fissures