Return to normal?

This past week we have had the big return to school, the return to Parliament and the back to reality feel of the end of the summer holiday season.

In France they make a big thing of the ‘rentrée’, but it has a more unspoken maybe, yet just as big an impact over here. It is when things supposedly get back to normal – a return to ‘business as usual’. What will ‘normal’ be in commercial terms this time around: will it be a keeping-calm-and-carrying-on kind of normality, or will it be a frozen-with-fear-about-the-future inactivity?

How confident are we all, and is business, about the coming months? After all, we have the government’s death-by-a-thousand-cuts programme to negotiate, the fragile economic climate to weather and the prospect of a possible double dip recession to confront (especially if we all let our fear get the better of us) – all of which challenge even the most optimistic of us.

Yet some stats are more positive and the FTSE has risen of late, as if to throw down the gauntlet to business returning from the holidays. The index is in effect saying ‘rise to the challenge of recovery, be confident and expose yourself to the risk of success’. Go to it!!