Financial indices continue to fall. Car-makers in particular, both here and more dramatically in the United States of America, where almost no one survives without a car, are struggling to survive, closing down for variable periods of time or laying off vast numbers of staff with little warning beyond the dire daily news and with instant effect. Those doing best from the recession have essential skills to offer as journeymen plumbers, electricians, decorators, tailors, mechanics, able to undercut established companies with large overheads and higher prices. The youngest jobseekers in skilled fields are also seen as unusually desirable, coming with lower expectations and hired for lower salaries, than their more experienced older brothers and sisters. Companies with an eye to the future may be in a position to cherry-pick top graduates and, as it were, lay them down like good young wine for later success.

Meanwhile, the government struggles manfully to present an unvarnished, honest picture of the hole we are all in whilst flailing around to find a foothold for optimism and assuring us that, contrary to our present view, we are already climbing out, almost. Lord Mandelson as business secretary is, despite his often grey and gloomy aspect, leading the cheerfulness brigade, attacking vigorously the head of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, over his claims that the United Kingdom economy is in spiralling decline. I have a great deal of time for Lord Mandelson, a man better able to understand and explain in simple terms the Laocoönian coils of political argument than most.

I gather, though, from Mumbai gossip, that his fleetness of foot deserted him on his recent trade trip to India where his manners implied the usual, deeply regrettable, ‘you-need-us-more-than-we-need-you’ attitude to Indian businessmen, the most influential of whom no longer bother to attend such events, which increasingly become merely flag-flying for British expats and for our domestic press. After the foreign secretary’s earlier disastrous sashay over Kashmir, it has to be asked, what is it with British foreign secretaries? One has to wonder sometimes whether British politicians should be allowed abroad at all, certainly whether they should be allowed to visit historically colonial countries where they appear to have a trumped-up idea of their own relevance. More pertinently, who on earth is responsible for their pre-trip briefings?

But enough of heavy-footed politicians and depression for now, I have found a glimmer on the horizon and something to celebrate. This month brings the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth and 2009 is also the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. A rash of activities to mark both events are in hand, including major museum exhibitions and Darwin festivals, renewed interest in Down House, Kent, where he lived for more than 40 years and the inevitable range of postage stamps.

So far as I am concerned, one of the greatest delights has been the revelation that the Roman Catholic church, so long believed to have dismissed the theory of evolution as heretical bunkum since it made Adam and Eve and the Book of Genesis look a teensy bit like a fairy-tale, has been saying no such thing for at least 50 of the last 150 years. On the contrary, the Vatican has now stated loudly that the theory of evolution is compatible with Christian faith and, with slight oneupmanship, could be traced back to St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. Most delightfully, the centre of the Roman Catholic church has now ranged itself with the general run of sensible contemporary people, believers or not, in stating that Creationism or Intelligent Design, the theories favoured by the most conservative and evangelizing Christian sects, are not good science. Since Pope Benedict — again, whether or not you believe in what he stands for — is a great academic theologian, this view gels satisfactorily with an earlier statement from him that these, admittedly Protestant, fundamentalists are “not proper churches”.

I wish a more liberal view of Darwinism had been more obviously prevalent among Catholics during the last 50 years. It would have made that church somehow so much more credible. Considerably less time ago than that, I had pneumonia while attending a school in Italy, my convalescence providing the opportunist Catholic convert principal with, she thought, a chance to save a soul, or two souls actually, hers and mine. She practically spat at the very idea of Darwin. To her disappointment, she failed dismally in her efforts, leaving me instead, many lives of saints later, with an unnecessarily extensive hagiographical knowledge which has been no use to me at all beyond an ability to identify saints in paintings by the particular means of their martyrdom, only valuable for the entertainment of ghoulish children being forcibly cultured.

Almost the best part of the whole publicized coming out of the Vatican as a relatively scientifically sophisticated institution is that the conference on Darwinism to be held at the Pontifical Gregorian University next month has declared that it will, on second thoughts, discuss Creationism as “a cultural phenomenon”. As bloggers have been pointing out, that puts it neatly in place with other cultural phenomena such as ‘slebs’ like Paris Hilton and also gives a chance for a room full of highly educated monseigneurs and cardinals, the princes of the church, to snigger at the primitive faith system of the usually US-based Intelligent Designers. One of their number possibly being the former president, George Bush, although he has hedged his bets according to his audience. Shucks,the very thought of his beliefs just about gets me back to recession depression at home again.

The snow at least has melted away and the snowdrops are out in the garden. It is a little warmer at last so we can save on the heating but spring, when it comes, is unlikely to herald the sowing of seeds for a crop of financial plenty this year and all we can do is muddle on as best we can. The real problem that remains is that none of us has a clue to what the solution to any of this is. We know that, the government and the politicians know that, and they know that we know that they know that, so until we find a voice that can define beginnings, middles and endings to the situation, we are all going to go on drowning in the same bag. It may be slightly comforting for most people to be in the same position as their neighbour, but this sort of problem shared is most definitely not a problem halved. Maybe, it is all part of the evolutionary process.