Buddy, I can still spare a dime

I’ve puzzled for a few days how to wrap up the first year of this blog.
The answer's easy, though.
With a thank-you, of course, because 4,880 of you have taken a peek and had a read (or a laugh) at what I’ve had to say.
The biggest audience by far has been in the UK, with useful chunks coming from the USA, Germany and France. So the transatlantic alliance is alive and well and relations with Europe weren’t completely trashed by the Cameron V Sarko bust-up.
I’d also like to say thank you to some regular readers in Russia, India, Hungary and Singapore, and some welcome attention from Brazil and Canada.
What have you been reading? The single most-visited post was ‘Champagne, Chips and property development’, some thoughts about the Invest in Nottingham Club’s London day (and the champagne and chips I had at St Pancras).
But even that was dwarfed by the three posts which followed Westfield’s bombshell decision to sell Nottingham’s Broadmarsh shopping centre on the eve of a planned £450 million redevelopment. I’ll have a few more snippets on that in January.
Various observations on the economy, notably about oil prices, inflation, employment trends and public sector job losses, also appeared to go down well.
Well, I hope they did anyway. I’ve tried to shed light on a mix of major business-related issues in Nottingham and get underneath what seem to me some misleading analyses of where our economy is at.
Once again, I’ll have more to say on that shortly and it won’t all be depressing.
One of the lessons I’ve learned over the years in business journalism is that people who own and run businesses can get really fed-up of clichéd representations of what they do, and don’t regard one set of bad numbers as reason to give up and go home.
So ‘leaps’ in this number or ‘plunges’ in that might make today’s headlines but they tell you little about economic reality. Rifling through the Office for National Statistics website, you soon discover that some of these leaps and plunges aren’t leaps and plunges at all.
Similarly, the biggest beef for me at the moment is the lack of long-term perspective in some reporting of our economic predicament. Yes, we are going through an unprecedented economic crisis, but we are doing so during a period of unprecedented wealth and health. So, buddy, I can still spare you several dimes.
Whether its Christmas, the holidays, Hanukkah or just another day at the office, have a good one.