Well then 2018 has come and gone. Normally at this time of year I look back at the events and work out whether they were good or bad.
In politics it was an eventful year, Donald met Kim, Angela announced she’s leaving, Theresa hung on and on and on and the French have rapidly fell out of love with Emmanuel. We had a couple of royal weddings, one major and one minor, and Hannah Montana got hitched as well.
Digital currency soared and then fell and we still don’t really know what it is. We did discover that the big social media companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter are selling our data to anyone who wants it and what they are doing with it will probably only be beneficial to them and not us.
Hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanos all happened but was it more or less than previous years? The argument about climate change goes on and still no one is really doing anything about it, except the Japanese who have decided to start killing whales commercially again as apparently whales generate too much methane. I am not worried about the rise in sea levels but I have asked the Amwaj authorities to build another couple of feet on the lock gates.
In sport we had the Winter Olympics where the North and South Koreans fielded a joint women’s ice hockey team which was far more symbolic than effective. We had a world cup in Sochi which gave us a number of surprises. Germany didn’t even make it out of the group stages, Brazil got knocked out by Belgium and England made it all the way to the semi finals which caused mass euphoria because it was the best showing since they won it in 1966. It was won by
France who beat Croatia in the final. Elsewhere Lewis Hamilton won his fifth F1 world title and the English women’s netball team won the Commonwealth Games which apparently was a surprise.
The Russians made an incredibly inept attempt to murder a former spy in Salisbury using a highly toxic nerve agent which was immediately traced back to them. They only managed to kill an innocent bystander, the original targets recovering from the effects. It is Brexit however that has dominated the year in northern Europe. After another year of discussions, threats, deals, no deals and complete confusion we still have no agreement on how the United Kingdom is going to leave the EU. The British government it seems also have no idea as to how it is going to happen.
And to top it all a toy aircraft manages to close the UK’s second busiest airport for two days. As highly imaginative as I am I could not make up some of these stories in my wildest dreams.
As we go into 2019 we have no idea what it is going to bring for us, there will be laughs, there will be tears, there will be highs and lows, there will be suffering and tragedy, but I do hope that whatever it brings it brings joy and happiness to you and yours.