Wednesday 8th February

I don’t often travel on the tube, or even the buses early in the morning, long gone is that daily trudge to work, but today I had to be in town for a meeting quite early. And I was just amazed at how downcast everyone looked, I know that it was a Tuesday and a long way from the weekend, but surely they couldn’t all hate their jobs so much; not a happy face amongst them. I suppose I am used to the mid-morning shoppers and tourists, families out for a day’s visit to the capital, not the nine o’clock brigade.  But even mid-morning lately I have noticed how glum people are looking.  Is it just the economic situation, or the cold snap of a late winter we are having, or a strange combination of the two.  Or is it something deeper going on in society, some malaise that has affected us all.  The secret knowledge that this is as good as it gets, or actually a few years ago was the best it would ever get, and we are now on some sort of inevitable slide, some downward slope with no hope of rescue.  Those days of constantly rising house prices have long gone, the best we can hope for now is that our property will not fall too far in value, especially for many who are staring negative equity in the eye, or at best, another twenty or so years of being stuck in a flat they do not love.  Bought in the frenzy of ever-rising prices; and everyone urging them to get on the property ladder before it’s too late, a mad sort of pass the parcel infected us all, and now we are left with nothing but a pile of paper with a forfeit or two lurking amidst the unwrapping.  And these are the lucky ones, those who rent face the prospect of never ever having their own house, but always the insecurity of six-month lets, and their meagre belongings sit in other peoples rickety wardrobes, and even the sofa they sit upon belongs to another.

The secret ingredient, of course, is confidence, or the lack of any.  And our politicians are simply adding to the gloom, heaping misery on us with each passing month, and they say the worst of the cuts announced with such confidence just over a year ago as the cure-all for our woes, a short sharp shock to the system, and then we would get back on track; these cuts which made us so gloomy at their announcement are mostly still to bite, the redundancy notices are being prepared as we speak.  And now, the realisation, that far from being short and sharp, they will be prolonged and increasingly futile.  What we need is a reason to be happy; maybe the Olympics will cheer us up for a while.