What a year it has been. I'm still finding it hard to believe that I had my gallbladder out in March, my parents came to help me recover through Easter and now its already July. If I didn't have the scars to prove that I had someone digging around in my gut, I wouldn't believe it.
Workwise it has been a tough year, economies tanking, clients not wanting to pay or taking long to pay, there just not being a lot of work to go around. Here in the UK, the design field has been hit really hard in this downturn. We have been luckier than most but its grim out there. I remember in Atlanta in 1991 the rumour was that 50% of architects were out of work at at the height of that recession. Here the statistics are equally grim - with massive increases of 861% for architects signing up as unemployed! Probably doesn't help that last year may have been the most frenzied year I had ever seen in the fight for urban designers and architects. Planning also continues to be slow and the Landscape Institute (body for LAs here in UK) is having to reorganise itself.
Outside the industry things are pretty tough. Unemployment in UK is reaching above 2.5 million. I hear from friends in the States that things are also down there - I think we are all just worrying about another shoe dropping or are we headed up, out the other side?
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