Be positive, be inventive

The week started badly. Some call it Blue Monday, others Miserable Monday, but all agreed that January 19 was the most depressing day of the year.
Christmas has slipped into memory, credit card bills are arriving and the weather has been miserable.
Certainly recent weeks have seen a flood of grim economic headlines in the national news and jobs have been lost in mid-Somerset.
I do not mean to underestimate the real hardships felt locally by people suffering from the effects of the economic downturn, but there are parts of Britain which are being hit much harder.
We don’t have a Honda factory like Swindon, a Wedgwood pottery like Stoke-on-Trent or head offices of big financial institutions like London.
Once we did have big manufacturing employers like Clarks shoes in Street and Shepton Mallet, Nutricia baby foods and Clares shopping trolleys in Wells.
These jobs have already gone. We have been through that pain and the mid-Somerset economy is now more reliant on service and high-tech industries.
Such firms are much smaller and employ fewer people, but they are often less vulnerable in a recession.
One weakness we must avoid is our tendency to make the situation worse by seeing doom and gloom everywhere.
Our economy is in trouble but to clamber out of the slump as soon as possible we need to be positive and inventive.
Philip Welch