I'm just back from a week's holiday in a remote part of Spain, and before departing I half-seriously wondered aloud about what sort of momentous events would occur while I was away.

Quite a few, as it turned out, both within the industry and beyond. Returning to Gatwick yesterday I gazed out of the window at some rather forlorn looking XL planes parked on the sidelines and thanked my lucky stars I was on EasyJet, which was in itself a pretty unusual feeling. By the time I got home and watched Newsnight, with its analysis of the likely impact of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, I was beginning to feel like turning around and heading for the hills again. Commentator Anatole Kaletsky stated that it was the worst crisis for 60 years, and harked back to the days of America's Great Depression.

In the printing industry we know a bit about depression, that's for sure. One of the last comments in my pre-holiday notebook was from a seasoned print boss who described commercial print in the UK as "imploding" and said conditions were the worst he'd known since the full-blown recession of the early 1990s. For more than a decade now people have been talking to me about the likelihood of a major "correction" in print supply and demand. Looking at the restructuring going on among papermakers, and with news of print company failures emerging on an almost daily basis, I wonder if world events will hasten the arrival of this mythical correction point now?