Welcome to Boracic Park

That’s right – just now, while we’re still deciding whether to embrace poverty or kill ourselves, we’ve nothing better to do than write headlines with rhyming slang in them (boracic lint = skint, ie penniless).

And while our MPs are industriously fixing the income tax system so its worse excesses kick in about a quark above their salary, the rest of us are trudging round the recession theme park with our heads down looking for small change.However, since I wasn’t born yesterday, or even the day before, I can advise you about how recessions go:

Phase one – Denial

· Wall-to-wall media drivel from soi-disant experts about how to survive a recession and save your job

· Swingeing job cuts in the media

· Applause

· Young people saying life isn’t fair

· Old people saying they’ve seen it all before

· Miserable bastards saying this is the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the world

· Politicians, central bankers, treasury officials etc denying any prospect of a downturn

Phase two – Downturn

· Politicians, central bankers, treasury officials etc saying they’ve been warning about a downturn for years

· Companies going bust

· People having their homes repossessed by banks now partially owned by the people they’re kicking out

· More media drivel, but now with a harder edge, eg: how to live rough / grow turnips / make Christmas presents from gravel / darn socks / go bankrupt / emigrate / beg / shoplift / join the Foreign Legion / become an MP

· Gangs of middle class folk roaming the streets looking for rich people, politicians or bankers to lynch

· Global rope shortage

Phase three – Amnesia

· Sudden realisation that the recession has been over for two or three years but you couldn’t be arsed to go to work

· Credit boom

· Property boom

· What recession?

It’s all about timing isn’t it? By the time anyone’s spotted the problem we’re half way through it, and the only people who ever foresee a recession are those irritating swine who never predict anything else, and are thus as useful as stopped clocks – which are absolutely accurate twice a day. It’s just that you don’t know when.

Luckily I've had the foresight to get my hindsight in early, and I'm already working on the boom after next.