Probably maybe

I thought that the first words from my friends in the sector would be along the lines of: I'm so happy that you are already back at work. In order to stay in a good mood, sometimes you need to look for a hidden agenda - if, of course, one exists.
One of the symptoms of a crisis is the growing number of pregnancies in companies. Everyone knows that when things are not going well you need to save money on (for example) your staff, so getting pregnant is a great way of protecting yourself from losing full-time employment. My above-mentioned acquaintance probably based his witty and calculated piece of advice along this line of thought. So we can probably expect hard times ahead of us. The word 'probably' is a key element here.

During the gala, one financial advisor from a German bank asked me where the optimism came from which could be found in the pages our magazine - an optimism that was groundless in his opinion. On the other hand, when discussing the condition of the sector with an agent, she told me that her agency had not had such a successful year for quite some time. Indeed, you would be hard pushed to find an optimist happy with the situation on the market or company results in London, but in our neck of the woods it is a completely different story. Each point of view is right... probably. In this way we have returned to the crucial word for us. So in this latest issue of the magazine, we summarise 2011, ask experts for their forecasts for the months ahead of us and report on the December Eurobuild Awards gala, which, judging by its scale, had not been adversely affected by the crisis in the slightest.