It’s wrong to say I miss the recession, isn’t it?

It’s like admitting a penchant for X-Factor’s sneery-faced, forgotten pop brat Cher Lloyd.

It’s the equivalent of preferring KFC to Nando’s. It’s about as ridiculous as bemoaning the loss of Britannic Warehouse (a desperate discount bunker of pile-it-high, sell-it-cheap, back-of-lorryesque tat, located in Birmingham’s incongruously named Sandpits area).

The problem I have is... it’s true. It’s all true. Even the bit about Cher Lloyd. My, how I miss seeing her stomp charmlessly across The X-Factor stage like a four-year old denied the use of her mum’s Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Not as much as I miss the recession though.

You knew where you were during the recession, which was usually ‘ravenously in need of payday.’

You knew who the bad guys were too. In the darkest days of the downturn, the nation united to denounce the banking industry, vowing never again to allow the greed of one sector to ruin the livelihoods of the wider populace.

Politically, the recession made the sport of despising leading politicians almost as popular as any of the Olympic sports. Whether it was the cuts of Cameron, the ‘meh’ of Miliband or the clangers of Clegg, we achieved an unusual consensus across the nation: our political leaders were as underwhelming as a hotel Continental breakfast.

Going back to the Olympics: despite being in the midst of the deepest monetary mire in decades, we still managed to enjoy a sporting extravaganza that only cost £9 billion.

That was the recession for you – ceaselessly surprising. One minute you’d be told that the UK was so penniless we’d all have to resort to a medieval bartering system – the next, you’d hear someone chirrup about a new £21 billion trainline that linked from A to B-Town in a moderately quicker time.

It was a time so unpredictable, just when you thought we were going to turn the economic corner, one flurry of snowy stuff would send GDP plummeting once more.

And, most importantly of all, the recession ensured that we were all in it together. Well, apart from bankers and politicians – they contented themselves with getting us into it. The rest of us saw our nation’s councils suffer the deepest of cuts, with pay packets remaining so static you’d think they’d been Botoxed.

But here we are in mid-February 2014. A time when all is rosy once more. A period which has seen unemployment fall faster than expected. A month which saw inflation fall below the Bank of England’s target for the first time in over four years.

Indeed, this month I attended a regional Bank of England breakfast briefing – the mood among the hosts and attendees was uncharacteristically chipper. Hitherto, this forum was as moody as a Scandinavian drama boxset. Now, in this brave new world, even the standard of bacon butties had markedly improved.

But as the bankers and businessmen dispersed from the room, clicking their heels joyously like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, I felt an inescapable sense of sadness.

If everything was on the up, what the heck was I going to write about now? I’ve only ever written a column during a recession. I wanted to be the doyen of the downturn, a chronicler of the crash. I thrive upon misery, like Simon Cowell on a bad hair day (which is, of course, every day).

Now, every month, I can see myself being forced into positive prose. After all, how can I avoid celebrating the fact that people’s pay packets are fast increa...ah, not just yet.

I’m certainly going to be forced to cheer the fact the perceived villains of 2008 – the greediest, least responsible of the banking industry – haven’t been allowed to return to their regulation-light, profit-hoovering, bonus-bagging ways of the pas...actually, I’ll park that one just for now. Especially as the general narrative seems to have switched to pinning the world’s ills on people who weren’t even here during the downturn (the ‘flood’ of European immigrants) and the poor people who had the least during the recession (poor people).

And it would be churlish of me to not congratulate our nation’s leaders, for Cameron and Osborne for only being slightly smug when announcing inflation figures, for Miliband for being... erm, there, for Clegg adopting his new role as Secretary of State for Being Virtually Invisible.

I guess I should also be relieved that now the nation’s quids-in again, I don’t have to worry about the people in the Midlands suffering from cuts proportionally more than affluent areas elsewhere in the countr...sorry?

What’s that you say? 1,000 more jobs to go from Birmingham City Council? 2,000 to go from Wolverhampton Council? Oh, I see.

Actually, perhaps prosperity won’t be so bad for a miseryguts like me after all. At this stage, the upturn looks a lot like the recession. It’s just wearing a bit more make-up than before.

* Keith Gabriel is a Birmingham-based PR account manager