On balance I like to take an upbeat view of events. But on the prospects for the economy some of my unkinder colleagues say I have gone too far. They call me Dr Pangloss, likening me to a blinkered "recession denier" who cannot see that we all going to hell in a handcart.

But I still don't get it. It still doesn't smell like Armageddon to me. So here's just a few pointers - some anecdotal I admit - that suggest that there's life left in this economy yet.

First, another colleague tried to book a West End dinner for himself and his better half last week. Restaurant bookings are one of those "canary" indicators that tell you early in the cycle that the economy's in trouble. Yet,the first ten places he tried were fully booked. Eventually he was offered a table...at 5.30pm or 10.30pm. There is still money out there.

Second, almost every leading litmus paper test of global recession has refused to turn red. This week a new all time record for an Impressionist painting was set in New York. There's still money for Monets. In the last major downturn you couldn't give Van Goghs away.

Third, where are the horror stories about deserted London high streets? They don't exist. Sure it's tough out there, but by all accounts the West End was heaving over the Bank Holiday weekend. Try telling the tourists from France, Spain and Italy spending their over valued Euros that the end of world is nigh.

Fourth, unemployment remain obstinately at record lows. There has been something of a shake out in the City of course. But how many of those people losing their jobs in investment bank are joining the ranks of the long-term jobless? Most will be re-absorbed realtively quickly and can live off the fat of their bonuses and redundancies in the meantime. The London economy is, thanks to the huge foreign work-force sucked into the capital during the boom years, a far more flexible beast than in the Eighties. Norman Tebbit urged the unemployed to get on their bikes and look for work. Now if the work dries up they will trudge down to Victoria coach station and go back to Gdansk and Bratislava.

Fith, yes London property prices are down, but are they down by much?  And how far are they heading? The indicators suggest that have fallen a few percentage points since the peak. Given they have put on 180 per cent over the past decade, that is scarcely the stuff of nightmares. There is certainly no sign of the predicted collapse. The doomsters said that overstretched buy-to-let landlords would lead the rout. Yet rents are up. Landlords have rarely had it so good as wannabee first time buyers bide their time and build up their deposits. The detonator that sets off a property market demolition has still not been primed. Does anyone know of people who are so desperate they are having to sell at a huge loss? I'm sure there's a few out there but I haven't met any.

I could go on. My feeling is that this is the last and most severe of the financial spasms of the past decade or so that the real economy has been largely able to take on the chin. The days when a slight wobble in the British economy meant a Ravenscraig or a Corby would close down with tens of thousands of job losses have long gone.

Dr Pangloss's prediction is that once the anniversary of the Northern Rock crisis is out of the way in September the great credit crunch will start to fade from people's memories. It's not going to be a vintage year but a new Depression? I wouldn't bank on it.

There are some big issues to chew on in the consumer world at the moment. The imminent collapse in the housing market and the soaring cost of basic food items to name but two. And I would not want anyone to think I am belittling any of them to return to a subject I've written on before. But I cannot help but revisist the great scandal that is the decline of the West Cornwall Pasty Company. To recap...this was a family run business that, for the first time in this Devonian's lifetime, cracked the formula of how to make authentic west country pasties in The Smoke. But last October the family sold out to private equity house Gresham for £40 million. And, I'm sorry to report it's been downhill all the way. It's been just another depressing example of how big business in general, and return driven private equity houses, in particular, do not get real food. First the meat ratio plummeted alarmingly. Now, in a recipe change that would have had the Cornish tin miners marching out on strike, air seems to have become the biggest single ingredient - and not west country air at that. A colleague showed me the innards of his pasty this week. He had only bitten through the pastry, yet the filling had retreated to the far corner. How many more "Gresham pasties" have been padded out in the same way. They are literally selling hot air, the stuff they dream of private equity boss finishing school. Perhaps even worse the shops are now selling a huge range of snacks as well as the pasties. Now at least half the selling space is taken up by bacon butties, hideous "anglo-pizzas" and sausage rolls. About as Cornish as a haggis. I predict that if the chaps at Gresham find they can make more money from these diversifications, the pasties will have all but gone from the range in a year. Very sad.

So for the first time in living memory the Chancellor is using tap water to moisten his lips while he delivers the bad news to the nation. A notable victory for the Standard's campaign to restore tap water to the tables of the capital's restaurants.

We have been calling for "tap" to be offered alongside the now ubiquitous sparking and still bottled varieties. But I can't help wondering if some diners at the very poshest eateries in town find it hard to ask for even if, with the very best of intentions, they start the evening planning to.

Is it just me or is there something difficult about the word "tap"? It is a short rather ugly sound with connotations of plumbing and dripping. Given how embedded bottled water has become in the process of eating out is it not time for a little re-badging to help the free stuff fight back.

I asked a PR friend of mine how she would rebrand tap water to give it a bit more glamour. She came up with "natural", "fresh", "non-bottled", "low carbon", "house", "free" and "London H2O." She also suggested Thames water, but given that's the name of a company with not perhaps the best reputation in the industry in recent years I thought this was a non-starter.

I quite like "fresh." It has the advantage of implying that mineral water, which has often been hanging around in cellars and store cupboards for weeks, if not months, is perhaps not quite so direct from the spring as its marketing people would like you believe.

It's going to be a long haul. Ear pleasing brands like Evian, Badoit and Ty Nant roll off the tongue in a way that clanking monosyllabic "tap" never will. On the other hand, however inharmonious the word its image can never be worse than most disastrous of water brands: Coca Cola's own version of Peckham Spring - Dassani.

There are two major consumer services that are still effectively run in the public sector and funded by the Treasury (I do not count Northern Rock, which, one has to assume, is only temporarily parked in state ownership.)

One is the Post Office and the other the railways. OK, technically the railways have been privatised but with more than £4 billion of taxpayer subsidy ploughed into it every year, it is no more a true commercial entity than the NHS.

So why is it that closing railways lines, even significant reductions in services, are regarded as politically untouchable, however expensive they are to run. Yet wholesale culls of post office branches, arguably equal valuable threads in the social fabric, are not only seen as acceptable but desirable.

The entire national Post Office network loses around £150 million a year, a figure exceeded by several lost making passenger frail ranchises. Yes, of course the Royal Mail needs investment and has other problems, such as the black hole in its pension fund, that are causing concern. But slash and burn cutbacks come with a massive social price tag.

Within a few months another 169 London post office branches will close their doors forever. The latest cuts comes just four years after the last round of closures. Shuttiing a post office is like axeing a branch line. Taken in accounting isolation the economics stack up, but the broader costs to society tell a different story. It means longer car journeys, more congestion at the larger surviving branches, a further loss of the footfall that supports the other small shops around it.

Two generations ago, the world's first and finest railway network suffered a similarly savage pruning when the Beeching cuts killed dozens of branch lines. It was a response to the perceived wisdom of the time that the car would conquer all and the railways had all the technological sophistication of the spinning jenny.

Wrong. Well, half right actually, the car has swept all before it but, too late we now realise it has come at a horrible cost that threatens to choke all our lives. Forty years on Beeching's name is a by-word for short-termist political brutalism, and not just among nostalgic anoraks.

Could we be making the same mistake with post offices? Surely one of the great challenges of our age is how to humanise local communities in an era when call centres, the Internet, supermarkets and, of course, the car, all conspire to squeeze the daily face to face contact that help bind them together.

Each sub-post office branch that is closed is in effect a small shop snuffed out.

If the surviving railways can be run as a public service in recognition of the huge social benefits they bring, why not Post Offices? It's the Government's call and public finances are tighter than they have been since Labour came to power. But judging by the strength of feeling expressed all over London to the latest round of closures there will be a big political price to be paid.

Everyone knows the old saw about waiting for hours for a London bus and then three turning up at once.

Well I can offer a new updated version.

Here goes:"Typical, you wait for ages for a bus. It turns up and then half way home it stops for no good reason." OK, so maybe it's not quite so catchy as the original - it's work in progress really - but the phenomenon is just as irritating.

I'm usually a cyclist but when it's wet or I'm carrying something bulky home I get the Number 27 from Kensington High Street to Hammersmith. This is not as frequent as I would like but it's a tolerably reliable service, run by the French transport company Transdev.

In recent weeks however, it has developed a most annoying tic. We will arrive at a stop, let the passengers on an off as normal and then...nothing. The doors shut and we wait. And we wait. And we wait.

One of those computer generated female voices tells us that the bus "is being held here for a few minutes to better regulate the service." Whatever that means. It doesn't last that long but the collective groan of irritation around the bus when it happens is palpable. I'm sorry, but the only "better regulation" of the service I want after a long day at the coal face is one that gets me home more quickly.

Enquiries at Transport for London reveal that it is all to do with a new initiative called the ibus tracking system. This is a kind of superior satnav for buses, that allows controllers to follow the exact path and location of all the double and single deckers in their charge.

If there is a danger of "bunching" - the classic three turning up at once syndrome - then the central TfL brain orders the bus in danger of catching up with the one in front to halt. Well excuse me but as a relatively regular user of the service I had never been aware of a major bunching problem before.

No, I suspect over zealous "Blakeys" (apologies for obscure cultural reference impenetrable to anyone younger than 45 - just google it) desperate to play with their new toy. If that is the case - get over it.

Think of me, the poor, over worked hack looking forward to a brief reminder of what my children look like. Every minute being "regulated" on the bus is a minute less quality time with the family. Bunching or no bunching I just want to get home.

Two more high street post offices got the bullet this week - the Crown branches on Essex Road in Islington and Ludgate Circus in the City. Royal Mail says they are losing too much money and have to go. Officially, the decision is only a "proposal" subject to consultation, but in reality we all know what that means. By the summer they will be, in Monty Python terms, ex-post offices.

They are the latest in a stealth programme of closures in London that is rapidly gathering pace. Over the past five years - while the rural network has been protected - 319 small sub post-office branches have been shut in and around the capital, as well as 17 (including the latest two victims) larger Crown branches.

That still leaves 936 branches within the M25, around one in 15 of the total network, serving around 10 million people - one in six of the population.

The cull is about to gather pace with a new, deeper biting phase of the closure programme. The closures are national but there are fears that London, once again, will suffer more than its fair share of the pain. The Government want to axe around one in six of all post offices to put the network on a stable financial footing.

In London that would mean around 150 going, but consumer body PostWatch believes as many as 170 could disappear, reducing London's network to around 750. Some entire post code areas, such as Olympia W14, are already down to their last branch. This latest cut-back could mean they are without postal services altogether.

The announcement of which branches have been been placed on death row is bound to provoke anguished howls of protest from residents. At a time when many Londoners are passionately defending their threatened local independent shops, this is one national chain they are desperate to keep.

In my local area of Brackenbury Village in Hammersmith we lost our only branch - a tiny sub post office - last year.

It is not the end of the world for me, there are several other branches within a relatively short cycle ride. But for the elderly and the infirm in the immediate area it is a definite diminution of their quality of life. The premises currently lies empty but there is a planning application to turn it into a mini-cab office. Understandably, local residents are not thrilled by this prospect with the promise of frequent noisy late night car movements. By any standards the change of use is not favourable for the neighbourhood and the campaign to stop it is already well organised and verciferous.

When the list of the doomed is unveiled on 19 February another 150 or so such local conflagrations will be lit across London. The Post Office will argue that each closure will still leave the vast majority of customers within a mile of a branch. That is of course to miss the point. At a time of a massive social shift towards "local-ness" - sorry ugly word - the cuts will inconvenience many and anger more. It will prove a big mistake.

I'm one of that rare and perhaps deluded breed. I actually like my bank. Truthfully.

I opened my first account with Lloyds when I was 17. They were my mother's bankers and the only national network with a branch in the village where I grew up.

Since then we've had our ups and downs - like most students I was admonished for drinking through my overdraft limit - but generally we have rubbed along OK.

And having a quarter of a century's relationship under our collective belts gives me huge leverage when things do go occasionally wrong. They need me more than I need them.

I often make use of phone banking to make payments and sort out other minor pieces of boring financial admin. This morning I rang and got through to Sheena with the charming Welsh accent. And what a jolly little chat we had. We commiserated with each other about our colds and compared notes about plans for Christmas.

She dealt quickly and efficiently with the two electronic payments I needed to make. It was all going so well. But, oh, Sheena, why could it not have ended there.

At that point the warm and friendly human mask slipped to reveal the whirring gears of the profit making machine that lurks behind. "While I've got you on the phone Mr Prynn, can I just ask you if you have any outstanding balances on your credit or store cards?"

Two minutes of training manual hard sell about Lloyds TSB's new 0 per cent credit card followed. That might have been tolerable if Sheena had not immediately launched into another spiel about a housing insurance offer for "selected customers". Sheena, I wasn't listening. But you probably knew that.

It was such a shame. We parted civilly enough, but it could all have been so different if you had carried on treating me like a human customer, not another commission earning opportunity.

So come on Lloyds. There are not many of us out there that are prepared to like you. Most customers hate being sold financial products when we haven't asked for it. So give us - and Sheena - a break. It could end a beautiful relationship.

There's something missing this Autumn. And I don't mean the frosts, freezing fogs and incessant rain that used to make November a contender for most depressing month of the year.

No, I am referring to the absence of any conventional travel programme on mainstream TV as the long nights draw in. For almost 40 years the likes of Judith Chalmers and Cliff Michelmore have been cheering up the dark months with their perky little reports from the more popular corners of southern Europe. But no more.

Commissioning editors have decided that the format is as old and tired as a two week break in Magaluf. ITV's Wish You Were Here was sent to the great green room in the sky in 2003 after a 29 year run. The BBC's Holiday, which started the fomat in 1969, lasted four years longer and was only pulled after its last run ended in March this year.

Now travel on TV means Michael Palin carving through huge wodges of BBC budget on his jaunts around the globe or Ewan McGregor showing off that he is as handy with a BMW motorbike as with a light sabre. Or at least he thinks he is.

Great TV maybe, but hardly reflective of the vast majority of overseas trips taken by British holidaymakers: "What's it to be this year kids? Two weeks in an apartment in Spain or six months tracking the Tropic of Capricorn on skateboards? Your call."

OK, so maybe the conventional travel show format had lost its way. Under the legendary Ms Chalmers it did not matter which part of the Med she was reporting from - the hotel always looked identical. And why was it the same middle aged couple from Penge always being interviewed on camera? Suspicious.

But the scope for modernising the format is surely huge. It seems odd that there are dozens of highly successful property based consumer programmes on the box - but nothing on travel. After all, we only move house once or twice a decade, but most of us now take two or three holidays a year. Top Gear has been a huge ratings winner for cars, but nothing as imaginative or funny has been tried for travel. Surely with a bit of imagination...?

It seems a missed opportunity to me, given how foreign holidays have been transformed in the household pecking order from occasional luxury to annual essential.

Or perhaps we really are all such globe trotters now that we do not need those little rays of televisual sunshine beamed into our sitting rooms as the winter rages outside.

Well, what a disappointment. The Competition Commission appears to be living in a blissful parallel universe where Mr Cleaver the butcher and Mrs Large-Whyte, the baker, thrive on the same High Street as Sir Terry, the supermarket boss.

Well it ain't so. Not in London anyway. This paper has been overwhelmed with responses from ordinary Londoners who have lost much loved local traders since we launched our Save Our Small Shops campaign last March.

And one of the three or four most common recurring reasons given for closure is competition from new Tesco and Sainsbury's convenience stores.

Bizarrely, today's report provide plenty of factual ammunition to suggest that all is not well in British food retailing. Then concludes exactly the opposite. It is like a well drilled football team creating an open goal opportunity for its centre forward, who then deliberately misses because he prefers the score as it is.

In its 269 pages the report details how a nation of small shops has been supplanted by superstore Britain. In 1950 there were as many as 45,000 butchers and greengrocers. By 2000 there were just 10,000 - and presumably now a whole lot less.

It is worse in some parts of London. In my neck of the woods, Hammersmith W6, there were around 30 local butchers in the early Seventies, virtually one for every block. Now there is just one - the admirable Stenton's.

Tesco has had its eye on west London for many years. Historically this wealthy residential area has been Sainsbury's and Waitrose country with Tesco largely confined to its Brook Green and Warwick Road redoubts. But that has changed in the past five years with clusters of Express and Metro stores springing up throughout the area . A largish new Tesco is set to open near the Standard's offices on Kensington High Street any day now and the company is very keen to develop a superstore in Hammersmith.

You cannot help admiring Tesco. They just keep coming. Like Rasputin, they are virtually impossible to kill off - even when councils turn down their applications. Maybe Sir Terry is right. Perhaps it is just the 5 per cent of the chattering classes who raise their noses in their air and the other 95 per cent really do love them.

But that is not what our readers are saying. The Competition Commission today effectively gave a green light to supermarket growth. Indeed in some ways it said there should be far more. For those who value London's threatened retail biodiversity, these are worrying times.

The best pasties ever made were produced in the kitchen of my dear, late grandmother. End of story. No debate.

She lived in south Devon, but I grew up in Berkshire in the Seventies, so her pasties were only an occasional treat.

At that time the so called pasties produced in the south east were hideous apologies of the great West Country speciality - greasy parcels of flakey pastry filled with a salty goo of uncertain provenance.

So when the West Cornwall Pasty Company arrived in London a decade ago it was a cause of great celebration in my household at least.

Here was the real thing, filled with great chunks of steak, potato and swede all wrapped in a properly "crimped" pastry shell. It may not have been quite up to my grandmother's sublime standards, but it was pretty close.

My fellow Londoners obviously agreed because those little black and yellow kiosks seemed to spring up everywhere.

It was with concern, therefore, that I overheard one of my colleagues complain last week about the lack of steak in his "large" traditional pasty from our local outlet in Kensington High Street. As soon as he said it, I realised I had noticed it too.

Could the West Cornwall Pasty Company, which started with such high standards, be suffering the same fate as virtually every other food concept that decided to go big?

It is a familar process. I've seen it all too often. As the chain expands, and the original owners look to a possible sale of their business, little corners are cut here and there to boost the margin. Look at Pizza Express, which reduced the size of its pizza (now happily restored) and Cafe Rouge, where savage cost cutting eventually left it a sad pastiche of a pastiche.

In the case of the pasties it might only be a relatively minor tweak to the recipe, replacing expensive steak with a little more potato, swede and onion, for example. Accountants will say the consumer won't notice the difference. But they do.

I hope I'm wrong. But I must say I was not surprised to see that the West Cornwall Pasty Company was sold to a private equity buyer for £40 million earlier this month. Honestly, those private equity sharks. They may know all that's worth knowing about realising value, exit strategies and boosting shareholder returns. But when it comes to making a top pasty, I'm sorry, but grandmother knows best.

ps Am I the only person in London who pronounces pasty the south Devon way with a long 'a' and a touch of 'r' as in car? Everyone here seems to prefer the short 'a' as in pasta. My colleagues laugh at my 'affectation'. Surely there are fellow travellers out there.