The rest of the year has arrived. It's called December

You got a seat on the bus on the way to work this morning: am I right? And there were no queues at the sandwich bar at lunch today. And last night you could get a seat for a movie without having booked two months in advance. Correct?

The explanation for all this is obvious. Everyone apart from you and me is on holiday. But here's the mystery. Even though everyone is on holiday, the cinema is still screening films. There are still people behind the counter in the sandwich bar to slap a slice of ham inside your lunchtime sandwiches and to charge you double by calling them " panini". (This practice is based on the hunch that the Aussie will pay more for things with an Italian name, like Prada, or focaccia, or Monica Bellucci. If the Democrats want us to pay more in taxes they should stop trying to persuade us of the social merits of siphoning more of our income into education and instead just use the Italian word for taxes: " tasse".)

And there are still people stacking the shelves and manning the checkouts in the supermarket. And the trains are still working – not at any respectable level, but no worse than it does at any other time of year, when the largest group of employees is the one hired to mint fresh excuses to explain the absence of any trains. (If you want to buy your child a cheap, noiseless present that's easy to take on holiday without swallowing your luggage allowance, buy him a City Rail train set. When he asks when the trains that you gave him will actually appear, just say they are indefinitely delayed because of signal failure, electricity supply problems, staff shortages and so on. As a present, it's both authentic and cost-efficient.) In short, the country seems to be running pretty much as it always does.

Now, an easy conclusion to draw from this evidence would be that if the country can run during December with, let's say, a quarter of the working population absent from their desks, factories, shops and garages, do we really need to employ quite so many people during the rest of the year? Isn't this – oh dear – a job-cutter's mandate? At first glance it looks like one: but hang on! If we sack a quarter of the workforce, there will be fewer people earning a salary; which means they'll have less money to spend on the goods produced by the company that sacked them. Far from prospering, these companies might find that they are worse off than when they were employing all these apparent wastrels. So, for their own financial self-interest and wellbeing, the companies then rehire them.

But how does any company (and all the employers in a country who, between them, make up the economy) know just how many of these apparent wastrels they need to pad out their payroll in order to achieve this delicate balance – without tipping over the edge and rehiring so many that the company's wage bill swells to the point where its products are no longer competitive? And how does the broader employment market strike the right balance? Luck? Asking an economist would be a quick way of establishing seven possible explanations, all of which might be as accurate as the suggestions in a "Guess Michael Moore's Weight in Cheeseburgers" competition.

This is because economists (economists are people who, when asked by their university careers officer, "Would you like a job where people pay you large sums of money, even when your forecasts turn out to be wildly wrong?" answered, "Yes") seem to mimic the working methods of utility companies. You know how gas and electricity suppliers send you an "estimated meter reading"?

Wait a second! Isn't this the same market that is currently yo-yoing like a drunk on absinthe; sending stock prices soaring one day because everything is going so swimmingly, and the next day sending them plummeting after suddenly deciding that, on second thoughts, things aren't so rosy after all?

So, has anybody got a clue how this curious employment alchemy works? Anyone out there understand what is actually going on? It's enough to make you feel a little anxious, isn't it? Well, you and me, at any rate. Because who else is around to worry?