Sue and Tony Whyman started the Childhood's Dream toy shop around the same time as we opened Your Life Your Style. Like us, they had the ambition of supplying the kind of hand crafted design-led products that you can't get on Winchester High Street. Like us, they took a location off the main shopping street. And like us, they found they didn't get enough people to justify the costs. We closed and they are closing but there the similarity ends. We fled to the internet, whereas Sue and Tony are bravely carrying on with a shop, although they are looking for alternative premises.

Talking to the Hampshire Chronicle, Tony blamed the high rents as much as anything. I agree that rents are too high for many retailers in the current climate but I accept this as a matter of market forces. If landlords are happier to maintain the value of their property portfolios than reduce their rents, that is their prerogative. Ultimately either the market will pick up or rents will come down. At the moment it may seem like the most popular national chain of shops is called Closing Down but I'm confident that in the future the mix of retailers will change as new and different opportunities arise and high streets will thrive again.

I'm not sure how much government can or should intervene. Mary Portas with all her combinations of good ideas and gimmicks doesn't seem to have made much impact on the city centres chosen to receive Government largesse.

One way the Government could make a difference is to the business rates. This is a tax set by the government. You might think in these difficult times for the high street they would be reducing the rates. Not a chance. Halfway through the six years I ran a shop, the rates went up by a third. And this was in the midst of an economic collapse. OK, the rateable values were based on more prosperous times, but the next review has been postponed, so no chance of any reduction in the near future. In fact every year rates go up by inflation even as profits come down.

Now that I run an online business from a room rather than a shop, my rates have gone from £12,000 a year to zero. Yes, thanks to a much lower rateable value, I qualify for Business Rates Relief. As an exclusively online retailer, I'm not complaining but it hardly seems fair that an equivalent retailer, like the Whymans, plying their trade in a shop should pay so much more in rates.