2023: how was it for you?

2023 has been a pig of a year but, let's be honest, things can only get worse.

Do you remember the days when we listened to the midnight bongs at New Year, linked arms and sang Auld Lang Syne, oohed and aahed at the fireworks and made our resolutions in the genuine hope and expectation that things really could only get better? If you do, you must, like me, be getting on in years. Halcyon days they seem now, and surely never to be repeated. We were naive then but now there's no excuse for such cock-eyed optimism. You'd have to be purblind or seriously delusional to believe otherwise.

As a species we're demonstrably on the slippery slope to destruction, that much must now be crystal clear to almost everyone except politicians and petrocarbon moguls. Oh, sure, the planet and many of its lifeforms will survive the Anthropocene Era, and even a rump of humankind may limp along against the odds, as it did through the last Ice Age. But that's not exactly a future to embrace is it? Still, nil desperandum, I suppose we have scant choice but to soldier on and try to make the best of it.  

And talking of soldiering on, it seems increasingly as though Mars is in the ascendant everywhere. We are assailed by wars and rumours of wars, which has been the human condition since we ceased being hunter gatherers I guess.  Now, though, our bellicose urges are compounded by catastrophic climate change triggered by our addiction to burning fossil fuels. The two phenomena are inextricably linked, of course, and we now find ourselves at war not only.with each other but with the planet too.

If I sound like the Sibyl Cassandra (or, for those of my generation, Senna the Soothsayer in the 1970s TV comedy, Up Pompeii!, whose warnings of “woe, woe and thrice woe!" were consistently ignored by the citizens of that doomed city) I think my prophecies will ring true to a majority of people. They may squirm to see them set out so starkly but they will find them believable. 

Anyway, without further doomsaying (and no drum-roll please) let's cut to the chase. Here are my predictions for 2024:

Trump to win the US presidential election;
Putin to win the war in Ukraine;
Netanyahu to ethnically cleanse and annex the Gaza Strip;
War to consume the Middle East;
China to invade Taiwan;
Malvinas 2.0 to break out over oil in Essequibo, Guyana/Venezuela *;
Climate disasters to escalate worldwide.

I'd love to be proved wrong on all the above, especially as (apart from the last) all are far from inevitable but, human nature being what it is, sadly I don't think I will be. It's a grim but realistic assessment of the current state of our planet, from which it will be apparent I don't expect it to be a particularly happy New Year. Hoping against hope, though, I wish you one anyway.

For auld lang syne, my dear...

* Thanks to Neil Partrick for heads up on the potential for this one.

Listen to Louise Harris - We Tried (Official Music Video)
https://youtu.be/o2XV20G85Tg?si=0zOo8nIMLRC2CKvx

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