UK economy gets back-to-work blues

Got those back-to-work blues yet? I'll give you a few more: don't expect work to look like it's on the sunny side of the street anytime soon.
Difficult though it is to believe, the banking crisis that sent our already dazed economy sprawling across the floor happened a year ago next month.
Since then the economy really has taken a pummelling, with the property and car markets in particular looking like they were out for the count.
They haven't exactly picked themselves up and turned from chumps to champs yet, but you get the impression that the worst of the recession is now behind us.
So, all well and good then, eh?
Well, no actually. Just as it took a while for us all to wake up to just how big a thumping we were likely to take from the credit crunch, so it is slowly dawning on businesses that the end of the recession (which, though likely, hasn't happened yet) will not mean that happy days are here again.
Infact, there are a few people out there who think we could hover around the edge of recession for a while yet.
I was chatting to a Nottingham accountant who works in business recovery and insolvency (that's companies who've had a financial car-crash to you and me) earlier this week and he reckons there could be another round of business failures on the way.
How come? Well, the banks have spent the last few months pre-occupied with their own problems, pulling the rug from businesses only if they looked like real basket cases.
Now that the banks are out of the woods, they've got more time to have a long, hard look at more of the businesses they loaned money to over the last few years.
And this is the point when they may not like what they see – particularly among firms which appear to owe their existence mainly to the boom conditions that prevailed from around 2003-2007.
Since the boom economy these firms feasted on has been consigned to the history books, the banks could well conclude they no longer make commercial sense and pull the plug.
My accountant friend told me that there are, sadly, a fair few firms out there who have only known a fair economic wind and simply don't have the skills and experience to handle a recessionary storm.
When you put those hard facts together with the reality that, at some point, taxes have got to rise (fuel duty's already risen, VAT is next) you realise that we're far from out of the woods.
Neither is it likely that consumers like you and me are going to spend our way back into the good times. Most of the money spent in the 'good' times was borrowed and a mountain of it needs paying back.
So there is no appetite for a plastic paradise anymore.
Whether or not you find this depressing, you certainly shouldn't be surprised. The UK economy suffered a massive heart attack and can't simply pick itself up and carry on as before.
It needs to find new ways of generating sustainable growth, it has enormous bills to pay back for all the money the Government borrowed, a lot of the foreign money that flowed in during the boom has gone, and we will have to grapple with structurally higher unemployment for some time.
This will take YEARS to overcome.
It doesn't mean we're an economic wasteland. As in all 'crises', most businesses manage and they change gradually. But it does mean we need to be realistic about where we go from here - and how fast.