Today, Friday Oct 3rd, I went shopping and walking at the same time. It was a blustery and showery day and quite cold.

I bought a Radio Times at one shop and then refuse sacks at a household goods shop. I asked the owner if he was feeling the recession. He wasn’t.

I then walked along to a TV shop. I asked the assistant if people had stopped buying TVs. They hadn’t. Perhaps, he suggested, this was because they could no longer afford to go out and had to stay at home watching TV instead.

“It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good!” I said.

This sentence was first written down in John Heywood’s ‘A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the prouerbes in the Englishe tongue, 1546′:

“An yll wynde that blowth no man to good, men say.”

The phrase ‘ill wind’ has also been used in connection with the French horn which is widely regarded as hard to play -”the wind that nobody blows good”. You could probably apply the phrase to the bagpipes as well. I have struggled for years to play the pipes properly.

I moved on to Waterstone’s the bookseller. There was a queue of people at the sales counter. “No recession here!” I announced to the three sales assistants. They humoured me by laughing at my comment. You can get away with anything as you get older!

I moved on to a food shop. The glass door was cracked. I asked if vandals had caused the problem. “No!” said the lady. “One of the boy sales assistants had shut the door a little too violently.”

“I quite understand,” I said, “My brother rips the handles off fridge doors.”

She looked shocked.

“He doesn’t do it on purpose,” I reassured her.”I put it down to tension.”

As I walked out of the door, a customer spoke to me:

“Cor! It’s bl**dy cold, in’it?”

Perhaps I should have said: “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.”

Instead I agreed and we both parted happy. I didn’t bore him with the fact that I prefer the cold to the heat. I love it when a cold wind blows!

Perhaps the recession won’t turn out to be so bad. In fact there would not be a recession if everyone stopped talking about it and just acted as if everything was right with the world.

Yet again, belief proves to be a key factor in all our lives!