SHOULD I be weary or should I be relieved?

I've been asked to do a piece on the 150th anniversary of Durham Swimming Club - the second oldest swimming club in the country - and while researching it, I stumbled across this front page cartoon in The Northern Echo of September 24, 1932.

It was at the time of the depths of the last mega-recession - reports that day told how hundreds of unemployed people had charged North Tyneside town hall demanding work, money, food, better dole, the whole lot put together...

The cartoon was the main image on the front page, and is based on the unveiling of the Blackpool illuminations. All of the illuminations that the cartoonist - Middleton - wanted to see are ones we want to see 80 years later.

From left to right, there's lower taxation, employment, peace, trade revival, disarmament, war debts cancellation and - the clincher - 2d off petrol. If Middleton thought petrol prices were too high in 1932, what would he think now?

So should I be weary that after 80 years of "progress" we are in the same boat as Middleton's spectators? Plus ca change, c'est la meme chose, as we say in certain quarters of Priestgate.

Or should I be relieved that 80 years ago, they managed to haul themselves up without going under completely? Yet it took a world war and 20 years.

Weary, I think, and worried.