They were few surprises in the Christmas trading this year. I think what we saw, clearly, the weather had an impact. I think it had a more legitimate impact on retailers than it would have done on the whole GDP itself. But it clearly did have an impact because people couldn't go out and it had a strange impact on the online side as well. But what you saw overall was I think the good retailers who are trading well have momentum, they continued. The ones who were struggling continued to struggle.

Some retailers have done very well, others have done badly; invariably most of the ones who have done badly have blamed it on the snow. But the function of the journalist is to assess how much of that problem is structural rather than just something that's a temporary weather event.

According to our figures, we saw the total value of sales in December up by just 1.5% compared with the year earlier. So a very small amount of growth in cash terms, but of course that represents a fall in sales in real terms and in volume terms

I think it's going to be a very difficult year for consumers, a very difficult few years for consumers. The numerous major headwinds concern rising unemployment, cuts in benefits, we've had a recent VAT increase, and the consensus of opinion is that it's a matter of when rather than if interest rates go up.

The other key issue is inflation because it is just eating and taking money from peoples' pockets at the moment and if inflation does stay high, there is a concern on interest rates and how that could impact upon peoples' mortgages.

We've done a survey of consumers just at the end of last year to ask them what they're expecting to spend in 2011. Five out of 10 of the consumers in the survey said they're going to spend the same. Four out of 10 said they're going to spend less, which only leaves one in 10 consumers looking to spend more money in 2011.

I think things like service are going to become more important. Some of the retailers that did best over Christmas have got strong reputations for service. And they will need to rely on that, they will need to more than ever be able to sell the benefits of their products rather than the attributes.

The sectors that are going to benefit are those with innovation and you are seeing good innovation particularly around some of the electronics, the iPads, all of these advanced digital devices. For the rest I think that we're going to see continued difficult consumer expenditure.

I think it's inevitable that we're going to see more corporate activity this year. It's never a good time to buy companies when they're doing really, really well, and certainly the strength of the economic and other headwinds against retail sector will mean that there are going to be some casualties on the high street

I think when you look across it's not a great market for corporate activity. Debt remains difficult to get hold of. There is a lot of retail businesses in negative like-for-like. It's very difficult if you a retailer with a negative like-for-like to then persuade your shareholders that you should buy something. So I think overall, I think it could be quite quiet.

Often if retailers are going to fail they're going to do that early on in the year. Having battled through Christmas, if the sums then don't add up, this is the time of year when they're most at risk and certainly over recent years we have seen significant numbers of retail failures, companies going into administration in this early part of the year. It really feels like this year we've seen much less of that and that perhaps means that those retailers who have survived the last few difficult years are perhaps in a slightly better position than the gloomy talk might be suggesting.