It’s not often you can confidently write a review (you could almost call it an obituary) of a year while it’s still mid-summer, but 2009 will be many people’s annus horribilis.

It made me laugh when reading this in the Wikipedia entry on the phrase “perfect storm”: “The phrase was awarded the top prize by Lake Superior State University in their 2007 list of words that deserve to be banned for overuse.” Because, like an errant child drawn to a big red button that says “do not press”, I can’t quite resist using the phrase to describe the current situation.

Depending on your economist of choice (ours is John Philpott, obviously), this is the worst recession since the 1930s/since the second world war/since the 1970s/since the 1990s (delete accordingly). It’s a very bad time economically.

As if that wasn’t enough, in recent years we’ve become quite used to global health scares that fizzle out. First there was the SARS coronavirus; cue one or two images from south-east Asia of public health officials dressed a bit like Dustin Hoffman in the film Outbreak. The media finds the nearest scientist willing to predict global extinction, and so global panic ensues.

It was much the same with bird flu. One dead swan in Scotland allowed us Brits to entertain our darkest notions of epidemics. And then nothing much happened. So when swine flu came along this year like the boy crying “wolf”, initially we weren’t too concerned. It then spread at such an alarming rate around the world, and through the UK, that the Health Protection Agency could only estimate the numbers infected. At the time of writing this, 36 people in the UK have died from it and more than 1,150 people worldwide. It’s a very bad time health-wise.

And so the phrase “perfect storm” seems apt. But if there is any cause for optimism it is possibly this – perhaps we are close to the bottom of this particular downward curve, and the only way will soon be up. The government advice page on swine flu believes that current statistics give “a clear indication that the rate of infection is slowing”. And although most economists are still wary of talk about so-called “green shoots”, the latest CIPD Labour Market Outlook survey finds far fewer employers expecting to make staff redundant, with the scale of planned redundancies also reduced. While Philpott keeps us all firmly grounded by reading those tea leaves to spell “things are getting worse more slowly”, at the very least things aren’t plummeting - things are beginning to plateau. Even house prices are looking more positive, from the homeowners’ point of view.

So in 2009 a storm was whipped up by the simultaneous occurrence of events that, on their own, may have been more bearable - but, in a way, perhaps it’s best to get all the bad stuff out the way all at once. Things can only get better. Hang on, wasn’t that someone’s election campaign song…?