UK lawyer hides marriage proposal in crossword puzzle

IT’S A case of two down: the aisle. A crossword-loving UK lawyer hid a marriage proposal in the Times newspaper’s daily puzzle.

Matthew Dick thought of the cryptic way to pop the question to girlfriend Delyth Hughes, and persuaded the newspaper to agree.

Tuesday’s Times crossword opened with one across: “Pretty Welsh girl widely thought not to be all there.” The answer: Delyth. Other clues included: “‘Will you marry me,’ say, that’s forward also rude.” The answer: proposal. Dick (38) told yesterday’s edition of the newspaper that he had showed Hughes the crossword at breakfast, with some key words underlined, then “reached into my pocket to reveal the ring”.

“She looked so surprised and didn’t say anything for about 30 seconds, before saying ‘No’ – which she thought was hilarious.

“But she did then say ‘Yes’ and I had to tell her this was the real Times crossword, not something I had printed out myself.”

Hughes said that she was “dumbfounded that he had gone to such lengths”.

“I’ve heard all the engagement stories but this one trumps them all. It’s so special and such a geeky way of doing it,” she said.

The Times crossword editor Richard Rogan said that he believed this was the first time the newspaper had included a proposal in a puzzle. It was “a oneoff”, he said, and wouldn’t be repeated. – AP Both the mechanism and the opposition to common bonds are easily delineated. Instead of Germany, Spain, Italy and so on selling their own 10-year debt, you’d have a regular calendar of issuance from a central borrowing agency.

Investors would buy 10-year euro bonds, and the proceeds would be divvied up among the common currency countries according to their needs. Such a system would allow bigger bond issues that would be easier to buy and sell, and a predictable sales schedule eliminating competition among borrowers. A 2011 paper by the Bruegel Institute riffed on those themes by proposing jointly issued “blue bonds”.

The scheme’s opponents, however, don’t fancy the idea of joint-and-several liability. They don’t want Germany on the hook if one of its weaker partners gets into difficulty and can’t make its interest or principal payments. If the bonds were in existence today, for example, Greece’s neighbours might be liable for its bond market debts.

There’s a way around that, though. Peter Bofinger, a German economist who’s an adviser to Angela Merkel, has proposed something he calls “euro bundles” that would avoid the taxpayers of one nation being liable for the obligations of a defaulting country. A joint debt instrument can be designed without joint liability. The member countries could issue joint bonds in the form of “euro bundles”. Such a security would package together the bonds of national governments in proportion to the size of their economies, so that a 100 (R1 396) bundle would contain a German bond of 28, a French bond of 22, and so on. Each country would be liable only for its part of the bundle.

Resurrecting the notion of common bonds would be a smart way for the EU to swear allegiance to the euro, using a blueprint that avoids burden-sharing. It would signal a commitment to greater economic harmonisation in the future. And, in the turbulent atmosphere that’s likely to follow a messy exit by Greece, it might just succeed in overcoming the resistance of its objectors. page 19