Another in a series of bone chilling days, and one where I was reminded via something I heard earlier on the radio of Pandora's Box, the mythological source of all the world's ills.

Pandora, apparently, could n't resist taking a peek into the sealed jar she carried with her (it became a box after a mistranslation), and out flew all the miseries and evils that plague us today: famine, pestilence, war, gloom, fear, and so on.

Except, there was one virtue mixed in with the maelstrom of vices: Hope.

I realise that at this point I could end up sounding like one of these avowed super positive thinkers It will get better. Think your way to success. All those mantras that seem to sell books by the lorry load. But the fact is I'm really not. There's a thick seam of doom and gloom running through me. Yet, bizarrely, I take comfort that Hope can survive whatever the host environment is.