Tuesday 12th March

It is nearly spring-time, and yet there is little sign of it out there.   I did actually see a scrawny handful of daffodils just opening their faces to the world at the weekend, though how they will cope in this icy wind I wonder.  It hardly seems to have warmed up all winter, a couple of sunny days and now straight back to winter.

The garden is sodden. The grass a dark winter green still, and even ‘Batchelor’s Button’ is hardly ablaze, just a few sporadic flutterings of yellow amongst the thin branches.  Green Park is usually awash with yellow daffodils by now, but hardly any seem to have poked their first green leaves out yet.  The shops are full of light spring jackets and flowery dresses, while their customers are still looking for hats and gloves.

And so people wrap up and huddle along the pavements, braving themselves against the chill wintry wind, and the whole population seems hunkered down against the bad weather.

In just the same way, no-one has any real confidence that the country can return to prosperity.  Maybe this is the end of growth as we have known it since the fifties, with each generation doing better than their parents, home ownership increasing, secure employment, more and more foreign travel, second and even third homes, and best of all the security of knowing the future will be fine.  Now we are suddenly looking back through the wrong end of the telescope, families renting forever, a succession of jobs, periods of unemployment and re-training, working on and on because you cannot afford to retire, children still living at home into their thirties, and the sure knowledge that ‘it aint gonna get any better’.

So where are the green shoots?  I am almost willing for the economy to improve soon, even if that gives the Tories a semblance of a chance to be re-elected.  I met yet another person yesterday who is being laid off work, at 58 he will struggle to get anything like a permanent job again.  This recession or downturn or whatever you want to call it is different from all the ones we have experienced before, where after a short sharp shock we bounced back.  Absolutely no sign of any bounce at all this time, just like the daffs in the garden, no real green shoots visible yet.