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Putting the 'ion' in recession
Bad as they can be, recession and New Years are reasonably similar.
In that gap of masterly inactivity between Christmas Day and New Year's, I went with the family on a bit of a bargain hunt to the shops up North (quit your booing and shouts of "traitor!", I live on the border damnit and I can shop where I bloody well please!). Course there's nothing unusual about a bit of a seasonal sales bonanza, but our expedition was slightly different, for our focus was around shops that were due to shut forever.
Zaavi in Derry was bad enough, but the real despair was saved for Woolworths in Strabane. As a kid I used to love the place, it felt genuinely unique, there were toys and books and games and confection you couldn't get anywhere else, it was like a treat to just go through the doors. Not anymore though. I was shocked by how skeletal the place looked (I since found out that even the shelves were for sale): everything that remained (a lot of it, it has to be said, were Matt Damon films, sucks for him) had a big yellow sale sticker on it, some stuff going for outrageously tiny prices. My Dad, for instance, got a bag of sweets in there so big it could be used as a medieval torture weapon for 37p. Talk about your mighty fallen.
With big shops like Woolworths and such enveloping the headlines as the main casualties of the recession, it's easy to forget that businesses are not the only ones who can endure a slump. It seems like the malaise affecting business is spreading to individuals, and it's contributing to a very real gloom and pessimism that begins to seem inescapable. And the problem with such a feeling is that once you have it, you begin to forget what life was like without it. Thank God, then, for January.
Whether you believe in resolutions or not, New Years can be a great way to exercise a lot of the demons of the past twelve months, a chance to press the reset button and start afresh. Of course, it's not a magic wand by any means but any chance of a clean slate when you're not feeling the best has to be taken. The kind of work I tend to do works on the feast or famine principle, and while when things are busy it's brilliant, when things aren't it gets very frustrating very quickly. But, it's also been my experience that some of the best opportunities come when things are looking their most desperate.
Bad as they can be, recessions and New Years are reasonably similar: both are a time to look back at practices that clearly weren't working and cut back on the largesse, and most importantly, a time to put all that to right.
By: Paddy Duffy
Photos from Flickr- Gaetan Lee
