A couple of months ago I was practically laughed out of our morning press briefing for suggesting an increase in meerkat coverage in the UK media is directly related to the health of the economy. On the surface I can see where my esteemed colleagues were coming from, especially when you consider my only ally in this thesis is the artist Tracey Emin.
The argument goes that whenever the country is at a low ebb we are either consciously or subconsciously drawn to the restorative powers of meerkats; they make us smile.
The real breakthrough years for meerkats therefore were recession of the 1990s when they became a regular feature on wildlife documentaries. They then went quiet with the onset of boom time, but over the past couple of years have come back with a vengeance.
And this morning’s trawl through the papers revealed such a welter of meerkat coverage I was forced to test my thesis using Google Trends.
I believe the two graphs speak for themselves.
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