Announcing a slump in pre-tax profits from £31.4m to £9.6m, Trinity Mirror’s new boss Simon Fox said the media group has “significant further unrealised potential”. It beats me how these people get away with that sort of Amerispeak cobblers, but they do, oh yes, they do…more and more.

I have a suspicion that the practice has still some way to go before the Zenith is reached, at which point a brave person somewhere will shout out “Cock!” (preferably at the AGM of the Milton Friedman Appreciation Society) and it may well trigger off an avalanche of demands for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. In the meantime, it all makes for amusing copy.

My lawn here in France is also showing signs of unrealised potential. It is roughly 90% lacking in its potential to be short and tidy, and as there’s over a hectare of it, the length does tend to dominate the outlook. I have a slightly better than feeble excuse for this, in that pretty much since I arrived there has been a slow-slow-quick-quick-slow waltz between the tractor mower, the snow, and the rain. The sun comes out, then the mower breaks down, then it’s warm while the mower’s being repaired, then the mower returns and the heavens open again, then the sun comes out and one gets five yards on the mower before the pedal-belt comes out of alignment, so it refuses to budge, and I cover it in horse blankets against the cold. Then it snows all night so I wake up to find a white lumpy thing, stick a carrot near the top, put a hat on its head, and retreat back inside to the fire.

But this morning, the Green Beast came back again, and I was able to give two parts of the lawn a trim. It was indescribably cold. For fourteen years here we had no snow at all. Now it’s snowed three years in a row. The hawthorn bushes at the north end of our land recklessly decided to come out three days ago, but the sudden temperature plunge has put paid to anyone else having a go. “Nous avons besoin de chaleur,” said my neighbour yesterday, and he’s not wrong. I’m all colded out. I’d like Spring please, and soon: my granddaughter arrives in five days, and being only five months old, she’s not going to like it much. The weather is definitely showing a lot of unrealised potential: what we need here is some meteorological QE.

For the last few days, I have been mainly burning the roof. Thankfully, it’s the old wooden slatted roof we took off two years ago. We stored it for use as kindling, but now I’m tying it in bunches and hurling it into the huge log-burner that sits at the far end of our salle sejour. Half the locals were invited to help themselves to the old roof when it was removed, and we still only got rid of about a third of it. It burns a treat, actually, but it’s going to take another ice age to polish it off the roof mountain.

On the whole, I see this as a great problem to have: nothing gets wasted here. Every rubbish bag is reused, every windfall twig collected for kindling, every poorly made Asian lamp rewired, every old rug turned into a tractor blanket. I remain sceptical about the CO2 thing, but I think preserving and reusing has the triple advantage of reducing the rape of raw materials, reducing unsightly landfill, and bringing the current completely potty model of globalism to its knees. It also comes from having been born when there was rationing: everything must achieve its unrealised potential.

One man who realises every last ounce of his potential but still fails to impress is Jeremy Warner of the Daily Telegraph finance section. He wrote a column yesterday in which he wished to share an insight with us: that the UK double and triple dip recession thing was a myth, on account of there never having been a recovery. There are many money-bloggers around (myself included, he trumpeted) that spotted this three-card trick over two years ago, but Jeremy employs a cunning strategy in his columns called delayed foresight.  He’s like a pill that is so slow-release, you’re dead by the time it gets into the system.

We all have our different definitions of a recovery, and mine goes like this: if it involves the Federal Reserve, Bank of England or any other waster throwing taxpayers’ money at the problem and then lying about the employment data, it fails the recovery test. There has been no American recovery, there has been no UK recovery, and the EU is so crap that the best Draghi could muster was a deep recession rather than a full-on slump.

That two laissez-faire economies like the US and UK could only avoid China Syndrome meltdown by administering obscene subsidies to the banking system and free State money to the economy is a joke of infinite hilarity….but one most neocons seem unwilling to appreciate. And so we are come full circle. Time to go down to your nearest Milt Friedman Fan Club and yell “Cock!”

Earlier at The Slog: EUNATICS & EUNUCHS OF THE GREAT PROJECT