Recession - certainly the talk of it - seems to have dogged us for months. But technically we are not even half there yet. The people who decide these things define recession as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. So far we have only had one. Even that is yet to be confirmed, although it almost certainly will be when Friday's GDP figures are published.

So, it will be three months before we know for sure that the dreaded R-word is officially back to haunt us - for the first time in the 21st century.

When it happens it will be unchartered territory for anyone younger than about 35 - at least in their adult lives. Remarkably, the British economy has not been in reverse gear since the Spring of 1992.

Then it was still reeling from a full year of 15 per cent interest rates. It took the ERM debacle on Black Wednesday - when an even fresher faced David Cameron shuffled sheepishly behind Norman Lamont on the steps of the Bank of England - to jolt the economy back into life.

This will be the fourth recession of my 43 year life. Each has been very different. The mid-Seventies downturn was a kind of Blitz for the Bay City Rollers generation when the great struggle with the miners meant the lights seemed to be more often off than on. Emergency energy saving measures left TV closing down at 10pm, gloriously enabling me to stay up for Match of the Day for the first time - the programme came on two hours earlier than usual.

The second great downturn, in 1980 and 1981, was grimmer, a horrifically unpalatable dose of Thatcherite medicine to cure the ailments of the post-War economy. No-one who can remember that time - the economic blanket bombing of huge swathes of the country, 3.4 million unemployed, the near break down of civil society in the inner cities - would wish its return. Or anything like it.

With the distance of quarter of a century it is easy to forget just how long it took to recover. Unemployment did not fall below three million until June 1987. Amazingly it was another decade, just after the landslide election of Tony Blair, that the jobless total dropped below two million.

The early Nineties recession was the downturn of broken dreams when the Lawson boom imploded in the Lamont bust. The pain was less intense, but very real for the many tens of thousands who suffered repossession.

So what are we in for this time? Higher unemployment certainly. Though no-one expects a return to three million on the dole. Much higher levels of repossession definitely.

But we have never before had a recession when interest rates were so low and falling and the pound was weak and getting weaker. Both should help business survive. Previous bouts of economic illness means that resistance is stronger than before, with a far more flexible workforce and management. We are a long way from the sheer grinding desperation that anyone of my age or older remembers so clearly from the bleak first half of the Eighties. Yes, it's tough out there, the worst for a long time, but we do need to keep a sense of perspective.