This is my last pre-Christmas post and I was hoping to find something cheery to write about - I was planning to congratulate Andrew Moss on producing my favourite Christmas card of the season thus far with his hand-made origami santa creation ("may all your folds be accurate"), and had begun compiling a cast list for a print pantomime... and then I heard this morning that Cooper Clegg had gone into administration.

A surprise? No. Depressing? Yes. So at the moment all I can think about are the several hundred print personnel who have already been laid off this month, or who are facing that prospect depending upon what transpires in Tewkesbury.

The human cost of the much-needed consolidation and capacity rationalisation in our industry should not be overlooked. We as an industry are going to lose some really good people as a result.

So all in all it's hard to look forward to 2009, as it seems inevitable that things will get much worse before they get better. I can but hope that at some point there will be an upside to all this.

In the meantime, hope your respective Christmases are as merry as is possible in the circumstances.