The apprenctice and the kebab a modern day fairy story.

Not everyone is screwed by the credit crunch. Every cloud has a silver lining, every repossession requires the employment of several bailiffs, suicide attempts keep nurses in work and on each pile of rotting, bloated corpses is a swarm of plump rats.

Or, to put it another way: "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade!" Well, as any drinks manufacturer will tell you, you don't need lemons to make lemonade. Neither do you need meat to make a doner kebab-flavour Pot Noodle. Apparently this new addition to the Pot Noodle range is practically vegan.

Excellent! At last, vegans are being extended the same opportunities to get hooked on cheap microwave food as the rest of society. But lemon-free lemonade and meat-flavoured starchy string are exactly the sort of products that are selling at the moment. Everyone is blowing what little spare money they have on crap treats. McDonald's sales are rising; Pontin's is expanding; people are looking for the sensation of wasting money, on a budget.

Why piss away a fiver on a latte and an almond croissant when you'll get a similar buzz from a can of Tizer and a battered sausage and have change from two quid? Plus the taste of your treat is nostalgically reawakened every time you burp for the next 36 hours.

Budget foods are flying off supermarket shelves (that's genetically modified chicken for you), bookmakers are prospering - presumably because lots of unemployed bankers are trying to keep their hands in - and the number of people doing the pools has risen for the first time since the launch of the National Lottery, for which ticket sales have also increased. So we can expect brand new opera houses and art galleries to spring up everywhere, which is nice because they'll be somewhere for all the tramps to sleep.

There are green shoots all over the place, though most of them are green because they died so long ago they've gone mouldy. So, in that spirit of optimism, here is a businesses that has managed to buck the downward trend which I found in the papers this weekend.

Homeless Security plc

With factories closing, hundreds of disused sites need guarding around the clock. But while all this property is falling into disuse, thousands are being made homeless. "We just took those two wrongs and made a right!" says Homeless Security's managing director. "The simple fact is that if there's already a gang of homeless sleeping in a disused factory, another gang aren't going to move in. So, on behalf of the administrators called in to wind up failed companies, we source a bunch of relatively tidy tramps to keep the place occupied. They're as dependable as guard dogs and cheaper since the cider we pay them in costs less than Pedigree Chum."