A nation is gripped.

A nation pauses.

A nation punts.

A nation is united in breathless anticipation.

For today is the day. The day of days.

Who loses? Who wins?

What will happen?

WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO INTEREST RATES TODAY?!?!

Will they increase? Will they increase by one quarter of one part of one hundred parts? Or will it be two quarters of one part of one hundred parts?

And when the result is known, once more, on this day, like that other day back then and the other day farther back, the same dreary bloody voices from the same dreary bloody throats will form a gibbering chorus of tuneless bloody drear and drive otherwise sane men mad.

From out of their dingy hidey-holes they’ll come to cluster around the microphones and cameras of the nation to yabber at us about the economonotony and what this one or two quarters of one part of one hundred part increase means for the nation and its people.

So-called “battlers” will once more plop themselves into the spotlight, filmed in their $600,000 suburban homes (NO DEPOSIT! 100% FINANCE AVAILABLE! APPLY TODAY!) filled with 90” television sets and IKEA bookshelves and Freedom furniture (NO DEPOSIT! NOTHING TO PAY TILL 2011! APPLY TODAY!) to whine about how they’re going to have to make a few sacrifices in order to cope …

“We’re going to have to dress the children in toilet paper stuck together with cheeseburger wrappers and live in the skipbin behind Woolies again … Oh me. Oh my. Woe.”

And, in a couple more months and a couple more months after that, and a couple more, this sewer of babbling bullshit about INTEREST RATES will happen again and again and again and the nation and its people will continue to be transfixed.

For these are the burning issues of our lives now in this, the bestest country onna planet.

The dark hordes of “the other” descending on our shores from the north and fucking interest rates.

And what it means is this …

Sometimes the cost of a thing goes up. Sometimes the cost of a thing comes down.

Whoop-di–do.

Get over it and live in the fucking world.