So here we are again on the last day of yet another year. They do seem to be whizzing by at breakneck speed and 2016 came in with a bang, taking our beloved David Bowie on the 10th day.
It is not going out with a whimper either, as we have seen another clutch of celebrities departing this mortal coil in the last week.
In between times we have had some events that went totally against expectations.
Leicester City won the Premier League and the UK voted to leave the European Union in a referendum that even the leader of the “out” campaign thought he had lost – conceding defeat when the voting stations closed only to wake up the next morning and find he had won.
Nobody expected that, which is evident by there being no plan for it.
In the US, Hillary Clinton had a supposed lock on enough electoral college votes to guarantee winning the presidential election, except nobody told the voters who backed Donald Trump.
Who would have believed it?
It remains to be seen if these two votes are connected by a wave of populism, in which the public became fed up with the establishment and started to rebel against it.
If this carries on into 2017, we could see radical governments win power all over Europe – and further disintegration of the EU.
However, for me the biggest talking point in 2016 was the sheer number of celebrities who died.
this an anomaly or not?
Back in the fifties and sixties, we only had a few real celebrities and they tended to be film stars, so when they met their maker in later years there was not enough of them to cause a ripple.
But an explosion in TV channels since the mid-seventies has created thousands and thousands of celebrities, many of them now in their 70s and 80s.
Is it any surprise that they are dying? They have in most cases reached the end of their natural lives. If this hypothesis is correct, the same ratio will continue to expire every year from now on.
Unfortunately, the D list celebrities created by reality TV are all still relatively young, so we are probably going to have to endure their mundane lives for quite some time.
So what is going to happen in 2017?
Aliens will finally make contact, but only to tell us that humans are too nasty to be invited to join the Galactic Union.
Nuclear fusion will be shown to be viable as an energy source.
Global warming will reverse and we will head into a new ice age.
Work will resume on Marina West and Amwaj Gateway.
Jeremy Clarkson will declare that electric cars are good.
And finally, Scotland will qualify for the 2018 World Cup. Aye Right!
Happy Hogmanay to you all.
Jackie@JBeedie.com