“IT’S been emotional. And exciting. Depressing and, by turns, elating.

The one thing the past 12 months have not been is dull. Never that.”

How right I was and yet how little did I know.

I wrote that in 2007 – before Northern Rock was swamped by panicky savers and when Lehman Brothers was still hailed as a global money-making machine, rather than the bank that almost made the world go bust.

VT still made ships, hell, it even existed. Ikea was just a tantalising possibility rather than a hulking yellow and blue reality. The container port was loudly boasting about ambitious plans to double its size, gloriously unaware of the tidal wave that was about to tear through its business.

Saints fans were sighing into their beer over the failure of a US sugar-daddy to sail up the Solent and rain dollars on St Mary’s, never dreaming salvation may arrive instead from Switzerland.

The world when I wrote those words was a very different place indeed.

Since then, it has been both honour and sombre duty to chart Hampshire’s rough ride through some of the stormiest economic waters on record.

Thousands of jobs have gone and great names have fallen and we are far from done with the heartache yet.

But now, as I write my final comment piece for this magazine before heading off to join Hampshire public relations consultancy Polymedia, it is possible to say with some confidence that we appear to have seen the worst of it and are coming out the other side. The dreaded green shoots.

The impact of the biting government cuts aside, things are maybe starting to look up in Southampton.

After suffering near total stagnation during the boom years, the city looks to be on the verge of finally realising many of its long-cherished ambitions.

Southampton, it turns out, may be something of a counter-cyclical city!

Long-mothballed projects are blinking again in the light of a fragile new dawn.

A quiet wave of optimism is abroad.

Watermark WestQuay, Admiral’s Quay, Arts Quarter, Sea City Museum, Ocean Village hotel, Centenary Quay – all of these are set to take big steps forward in the coming months. New tenants are lining up to replace the dead duck that is Palmer Johnson and create hundreds of jobs.

And Lloyds Register is still planning to relocate to the south coast, although it is taking its sweet time about it.

City leaders are also finally at least interested in talking about tapping into the regeneration power of the River Itchen.

Whisper it, but maybe, finally, we are about to see some things get done.

Bitter experience, however, leads me to be cautious. I have written too many stories about torpedoed development dreams in the past 36 months to shrug off the possibility of more.

Another thing I wrote in 2007 was, ultimately, bang on the money.

“So, making the most of its strengths and rolling with the punches like a prizefighter, Hampshire and its army of 564,400 workers look to have a bright future.

“In the end, that's what this is all about: The sweat, dreams and creativity of people like you”.

It’s been a privilege.