Face it folks, we’re in recovery mode, I can’t totally prove it — but we are

The recession and his degree arrived more or less simultaneously, so he went overseas for a job, landing in Wales. He was going to be part of a new wave of diaspora, connected by Skype but spun loose and lost to us, despite that.

When he began to do particularly well in the Aberystwyth high-tech company where he had landed, the fear was that, because it was a multinational, the grasping hand of HQ would reach out from Buffalo, New York, and the family, when they got to see him once a year, would be half amused, half ashamed of the Nu Yawk inflections he would inevitably pick up over there.

Not that he wanted to head off to the second most populous city in the state of New York. He wanted to head home, but, in the first year after his departure, that didn’t look likely. The papers were filled with pictures of individuals in long queues hoping to get temporary Mac jobs. That’s when they weren’t filled with pictures of people lining up for free soup-kitchen food. The troika was in town, the Government was inflicting austerity on everybody and the talk was of a generation who would — just as he had done — go overseas in search of a job, most of them never to return, even if they wanted to as much as he did.