Ranting about rants...surely not!

In these troubled times, we all need something consoling to cling on to, something familiar, although not necessarily something good. There is nothing more comforting, for example, than a cold, particularly if you've got the time to indulge it, which, in unemployment-racked Britain, thousands more do every day.

It doesn't hurt - the symptoms are as cosy as they are uncomfortable - and it's an excellent justification to moan. You know exactly what's wrong with you and can feel sorry for yourself, safe in the knowledge that you don't deserve genuine pity and won't get any.

There is nothing further away from the uncertainty and fear of worrying you may have a terminal illness than the gladdening pseudo-glumness that comes over you as the certainty of an incoming sniffle becomes apparent. "Oh no, a cold," you can say with a weary shake of the head. It's so different from how you might say: "Oh no, Aids."

Sometimes when people complain, it's because they like doing so, not because they're asking for a solution? When someone says they find it difficult following conversations at noisy parties, they want the response to be: "Oh, I'm the same!", not: "This is how you can get yourself a hearing aid." When I whinge about backache, it's because the whingeing seems to lessen the pain, not because I want the phone number of another sodding acupuncturist.

Familiarity is so heartening that it can cheer us up even when the familiar thing has horrendous connotations. Everyone was reassured when Winston Churchill was appointed first lord of the Admiralty in 1939, partly because they'd seen it before - he'd held the same post at the beginning of the First World War.

Like that went well! What kind of nutter perks up at the recurrence of something that, last time around, presaged the most murderous conflict in history? It's not even as if Churchill had done the job brilliantly the first time - he was responsible for the disastrous Gallipoli campaign. Surely no one was seriously buoyed by the thought that this new war might only be as bad as the last one?

With hindsight, we know that, had that been the case, tens of millions of lives would have been saved. But, in 1939, you'd have to be a severe pessimist to call that sort of speculation "realism".

Nevertheless, people were using their familiarity with a global war to make the prospect of another one less alarming: "It's just us and Germany and Churchill all over again," they felt better for thinking. "Bit of rationing, the odd zeppelin, every mother loses a son and we'll all come up smiling in four years' time, even if quite a few of us have developed stutters and get the shakes whenever a door slams."

Our fear of the future is so great that likening something to previous problems, however enormous, is far preferable to envisaging unprecedented ones. In other words, old problems are never as scary as new ones. Someone predicting that the credit crunch will be as bad as the Great Depression is something we can bravely take in. Saying it might be worse is a pant-wetter.

Of course our greatest moan, will always be the weather, and it seems that even with that, our days of moaning about the weather may be numbered; when it's 30 degrees in the shade in March, with the sea encroaching on Coventry, our nostalgia for bemoaning drizzle will be heartbreaking.

"There's nothing new under the sun", "'Twas ever thus", "Dear oh dear!" - these are the mantras of middle England and we need their calming effect now more than ever. So let's not focus on solving old problems that don't much matter or we'll be left with nothing to distract us from the insoluble new ones that do.