Maybe it’s the rain, but it seems as if the last week has been one of the more depressing since the onset of the financial crisis. The first phase is now over: survivors are walking around in a daze and the smoke is clearing but there aren’t many green shoots in the bombed-out and blackened landscape.

First, there was the bad news that while other large economies are coming out of recession, we’re still stuck in the mire; paying the greater penalty for our more grievous sins of the Uk’s last decade. Rather than being in the best possible shape compared to our competitors going into a downturn, as Gordon Brown promised us, we are the poor sap with the weakened immune system who’s copped a dose of H1N1.  Some are saying it could go on well into 2010, with Fathom sugegsting we may only get pathetic growth of 0.1 % next year. Consumers are trying to be virtuous by saving not spending; as the tax take drops further, the long-awaited belt-tightening by government has to come after the election - which sucks still more cash out of circulation. It all sounds alarmingly like the notorious Japanese debt deflation death spiral.

Then there are our state-owned banks which, following the enthusiastic interference of the EU competition prefects, appear to be on the verge of dismemberment. It’s hardly surprising that Stephen Hester is seriously peeved at what he’s being told he has to flog, because it will make his job getting RBS back onto a sound footing that much more difficult. These punishments all play well to the gallery, but subjecting RBS to a ritual public hanging, drawing and quartering make less sense if it means it ends up being less viable as a business. That way we are all going to lose out, because we’ll never get our cash back. If I’ve got to own a bank, I’d rather it was a good one with decent profit prospects than a cruelly humiliated and forlorn lame duck.

Just as my customary cheer levels were faltering - and I watched a couple of colleagues eating their home-made rather than Pret sandwich for lunch - I read yet another gloomy (but quite sensible) article, this time by Prospect editor David Goodhart. He says that the crisis has finally knocked us from the top table rudely onto the floor. 'Great' Britain, after a century of slow decline is now well and truly a thing of the past, and we just need to accept that we’re Little Britain and that 'we are going to need a new, more modest story about Britain in the world.' He doesn’t think this new, more realistic approach to our true national standing would do too much harm. The game is up for most of us in the West, anyway, as the Chinese are to be our true masters for the next few decades.  

If that means we no longer go on sabre-rattling international adventures of the sort favoured by Blair, that mightn’t be a bad thing. I can see us quite happily kicking Trident into touch and saying 'thanks but no thanks' the next time the Americans want us shoulder-to-shoulder when they go into Iraq or Afghanistan. Goodhart thinks David Cameron 'well suited to speak for a smaller, quieter land'.

With our national prestige at a low ebb, we’ve got to discover/rediscover what it is we’re good at as a nation and focus on these strengths. But are Goodhart’s suggestions - the English language, pop music and the Premier League - really as good as it gets for us in 2010?

Then again - how can we be too down-hearted in the week that Kai Wayne Rooney entered this world? He's just 1000-1 to become Prime Minister one day, you know.