As someone who finds every DIY challenge to be both more difficult and more boring than I anticipated, I was pleased to read today of a UK survey which found that:-

• Three in five men admit they’ve damaged their homes as a result of DIY mishaps.
• Half of them admit to having at least one unfinished project in the house.
• Almost a third have covered up disastrous stabs at DIY — in accordance with the ancient DIYers’ masonic pledge of: “If at first you don’t succeed, remove all evidence that you ever tried.”            

Despite all this, "a fifth of men still feel confident they can tackle any DIY task around the house." Better men than I, all of them.

Significantly, senior politicians of Germany, Austria, Holland and Britain got together yesterday to discuss ways of limiting free movement within the EU. I thought this was a cherished and immutable principle but it now seems you can keep out Rumanians and Bulgarians within existing rules. Perhaps by bending them, if everyone agrees.

There's an exhibition of fotos of 1900 Pontevedra in the municipal Turismo. As there's no book available - nor even a brochure - I've taken to snapping the fotos, for comparison with today's equivalent. Here's one such, which manages to hide the fact that the building on the left is now occupied by Burger King. More anon

One day this week, I counted more than 70 closed shops on my way into and out of town. A handful of these have re-opened as a different sort of retail outlet but I've given up trying to discern logic in the pattern. This, for example, was until recently a popular café on the edge of the shopping precinct. As you can see, it's now one of the countless boutiques which adorn the town. In a location which, I would have thought, militates against profitability. So one's forced, yet again, to assume the owners/investors are either stupid or cleverly laundering black money. Or know a lot more about retailing than I do.

It struck me today that those of the More Europe persuasion should be called The Augustinians. After his famous prayer - 'Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.'

To end on The EU again . . . Jeremy Warner in The Telegraph notes it's the 10th anniversary of the introduction of the euro and asks What if Britain had ignored the economics and, like everyone else in Europe, allowed the political idealism of supposed European destiny to take the lead? In answering this, he demonstrates why the EU should be grateful the UK didn't take part in this vainglorious experiment. Oddly Mr Warner almost beatifies the now discredited Gordon Brown for keeping the UK out, despite Tony Blair's wish to go in. Mr Blair, of course, had a liking for going in, all guns blazing. Here's the entire article, for weekend rumination. 

Despite the fact that Britain did not actually meet some of the Maastricht criteria at the time, Europe would no doubt have leaned over backwards to fast track us in – after all, most others were breaking the rules by this time – and perhaps as soon as early 2006, we'd have been a fully signed up member.

The immediate effect would have been to turbo charge the latter stages of Britain's already out of control credit boom. There would then have followed an even bigger banking bust than the one we had, followed by a Baltics style economic contraction.

The upshot would have been an even more terrifying deterioration in the public finances than the one that occurred, combined with sky high interest rates to reflect default risk on UK sovereign debt. Like the debt colonies of the eurozone periphery, pretty soon we would have been in deflation and depression, with little or no help from monetary policy to ease the pain.

Who knows, with Britain at the table, the European Central Bank might have been persuaded to adopt a more progressive approach to the problem, but however accommodative the ECB proved, it would not have been enough. Nor would Europe have been prepared to provide the scale of fiscal bailout required.

In any case, pretty soon, Britain would have left the euro; it is impossible to imagine a sophisticated, major economy such as Britain putting up with the sort of nonsense the eurozone periphery is being subjected to. In leaving, we would also have bust the euro beyond redemption. The single currency could not have withstood such an exit.

Loss of fiscal sovereignty was not an outcome the five tests in any way explored. Still, they were good enough, and I know that scarcely anyone has a good word to say for Brown any longer, but on this issue at least, he certainly did his country a monumental service.

If Europe had then been returned to pre-existing sovereign currencies, this might have qualified as a positive outcome all round, but the economic fallout and recriminations would have been monstrous and there is no knowing how it would have ended.

Curiously, Britain seems to have been the only member of the EU to have conducted such an exhaustive analysis of the pros and cons of euro membership. Headed by Dave Ramsden, now head of the Government's economics service, the Treasury team left no stone unturned, and in doing so, they came quite close to foreseeing some of the problems that would arise.

The challenge of adjustment in a currency union after an economic shock, which we are now seeing played out in spades in the eurozone periphery, was quite well explored, with one paper noting that without the tool box of monetary policy to smooth the adjustment, the whole thing would have to rely on rapid price and wage corrections. Demand would have to be managed exclusively through fiscal policy, always assuming the rules allowed it, which as it turned out, they would not have done.

In their dash for ever closer and deeper union, nobody else seemed to worry too much about these adjustment issues. Instead the Maastricht criteria on convergence were wholly focused on nominal variables – inflation, interest rates, deficits and size of national debt.

The five tests were never intended as an attack on the whole concept of the euro – in the climate of the time that would have been regarded as most undiplomatic. They were merely an evaluation of whether Britain was sufficiently converged with the European economy to be able to join monetary union. The answer was unambiguously that it was not.

In any case, it was probably for that reason that the five tests didn't really spot the issue which has come to cause the most trouble in the eurozone – that if you have monetary union, it must lead naturally to a high degree of risk sharing across countries. Europe's inability to accept this is at the root of the present crisis. Banking and fiscal union are still thought a step too far, even though the euro cannot survive unless they are eventually imposed.