Do you feel grateful? You've got to be kidding, right?

Just got off the phone with the BBC. I got a phone call earlier today asking if I would like to take part in a discussuion on the their Have Your Say programme and I said that I would be delighted to take part, especially after the BBC employee me asked me why Greeks were not feeling more grateful about the recent bailout deal. People here have a number of reactions to the EU-IMF brokered deal but gratitude is certianly not one of them. Anger, outrage, frustration and fear are far likely to be quoted but no one, and I mean no one I have heard discuss the matter considerd the current situation something to celebrate.

This seemed to puzzle some of the other participants on Have Your Say and many of the listener who sent in emails. Perhaps this stems from the fact apart from the raw economic facts people living outside Greece have only the vaguest idea of how things work here and how big a shock the present crisis is to people throughout the country. As I said to the presenter imagine being mugged and then being asked to contribute to your mugger's legal costs, which is basically what many Greeks are feeling at the moment.

Whilst everyone here is aware of the extensive faults of the Greek government (we live them daily) and the problems with graft and waste the the sheer size of the deficit created by the past two government's came as much as a surprise to ordinary people here as it did to the world's financial markets. Now it seems that the two major parties have not just sold off the family silver but mortgaged the future of the whole nation for at least a generation the mood of seething anger lies over the country like some kind of toxic fug.

How did it come to this? Where did all that money go? How come the country owes so much? are just some of the questions on everyone's lips. Now those who are responsible for getting the country into this "death spiral" as the BBC put it are now calling for a joint national effort to pay off an impossible mountain of debt. I swear that if the leader of either PASOK or New Democracy made a public appearence at the moment they'd be lucky to escape a lynching by a baying mob.

A measure of the fear that the present administration feels over the strength of popular resentment that it announced the fact that the country was going to go to the EU-IMF from the island of Kastellorizo which about as far away from Athens as it far to get and still remain in Greece. This is akin to Gordon Brown announcing the most regressive social measures in a generation from the Outer Hebrides.