Inflate your good news stories

We emerge from our holidays, blinking into what is left of the sunlight, to notice this:

Things are bad. Really bad.

Newspapers are going to have to keep reporting that until it stops being true, but it isn’t the only thing in the world.

Optimism, hope, creeps out from unexpected places. That’s only human.

Help us get to those bits.

Moreover, put the bad news in context. How bad is it really? And hasn’t this bad thing almost certainly happened before? How did we get through it last time?

I think there will be a premium in the next few months on commentary that goes beyond “it’s a disaster”.

And on the everyday stuff, there are ways of making it interesting. We know that inflation is a problem. Tell us specifically how.

A small example of what I mean from the FT the other day.

This tells us that the UK’s biggest chicken producer faces an extra £1m bill a week to pay for the carbon dioxide used to stun the birds for slaughter.

I didn’t know they used carbon dioxide. I didn’t know they stunned the birds first.

Does this mean there are loads of chickens that will live because farms can’t afford to kill them?

Chickens rejoice as stun-gas costs spiral.

That’s some good news right there, for chickens. Who mostly read the Daily Express.

So it’s an inflation story, but it tells us something else.

That might just be the hack doing her job properly. (It happens).

If it was the flak, nice work.