This past week the boot’s been on the other foot. Having recently made a terrifying debut in amateur operatics (made more nerve wracking by the fact that this Gilbert & Sullivan interpretation involved wearing leather and rather more make-up than I thought entirely healthy), I awaited the local paper’s report with baited breath. But, bar the slight implication that my acting owed more to oak than Olivier – what do they expect from an editor of the TTJ? – I needn’t have worried unduly. It bolstered my faith that journalists don’t always dwell on the negative.

Some do view us as rather vulture-like, with our radars set on gloom, ever ready to pick the bones out of stories of mishap and misery. But most of us really do prefer good news to bad.

Underlining the point, this week’s TTJ comprises almost exclusively the former. We’ve got James Latham reporting a 20% profit rise, with the company both winning new sales and selling more to existing customers.

Once ailing Magnet is also seeing turnover and profits on the up and AssiDomän’s nine-month earnings jumped an impressive 300%!

Meanwhile, Peter Buttle has expressed his faith in the future of independent timber and builders merchanting by leading a buy out of the Buttles business and Consolidated Timber has expanded with the acquisition of Hoffman Thornwood.

If that’s not enough, timber production has been placed at the heart of the new Scottish Forestry Strategy and European wood based panels sales are stil climbing.

The Healthy Flooring Network has even plucked some good news for wood out of the floods. It sees the sorry, sodden piles of carpet on flood victims’ lawns as an opportunity to replace it with healthier, less allergy-inducing smooth flooring, including, of course, timber.