What a day to have a birthday. With the world and its future darkening visibly around us, and crunch turning to munch, we’re all seemingly heading for lunch on a plate, not seated at the table.

However, amidst all that financial chaos there is some good news: Syntagma is three years old.

Three is a significant number in horse, dog and internet years. Horses get to run in the Derby, dogs are the equivalent of 21, and anything on the internet is a virtual centenarian.

When we started out 36 long months ago, this site was a pure technology and media play. It was also the cheerleader for the launch of new sites on a large sprinkling of topics. Now I write here only about politics, finance and technology, in that order of magnitude. You won’t need to ask why, discerning Reader.

Many of the old staff have moved on — those who remain have aged visibly, some even look like centenarians.

Enough of the past, it is another country as someone once said — The Shire, perhaps. If the future looks more like the Land of Mordor, I fancy we’ll glean something of value and interest from it, and certainly something to write about — whatever horrors it throws at us.

So what’s the prognosis for Syntagma’s fourth year of operations, bearing in mind it is a business as well as an online publication?

In the wider world, freight shipping is slowing at the same rate it did at the end of 1931. There are so many similarities popping up between now and the 1930s, it’s beginning to take on a distinct Tolkien shade of dark mist and distant pointy mountains.

Even Russia, with it’s massive half-trillion of cash reserves, is sliding into a downward spiral towards another bankruptcy and authoritarianism.

We ourselves on this sceptred Isle will not be spared a decade of pitiful growth, or none, as we purge the vast vaults of debt accumulated under the deceptively-stern gaze of Prudence in recent years.

As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard puts it in today’s Telegraph, “The world stole prosperity from the future for year after year, with the full collusion of governments, regulators, and central banks. Now the future has arrived.”

Well, we are still here. And we will prevail until we come out the other side like foot soldiers returning from the trenches. In internet age, I calculate we’ll be around 300.

Something to celebrate, surely?

P.S. As a contrast with today, here’s Syntagma’s first birthday piece. Read here.

John Evans