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No news is good news? Who says that? There’s always news, good and bad, but at this time of the year good or bad, it’s pretty unedifying stuff. Articles about who got what or who should have got what, or who would have got what if it was up to ‘me’ for Christmas. Some pretty unimaginative ‘alternate’ Christmas party/food/travel ideas, too late for anybody to do anything about. A million diet articles, all contradictory, yet all saying the same thing: ‘we don’t know any better than you do’. And Christmas fashion, for fuck’s sake. At Christmas the way you look is entirely in the hands of the ridiculous clothes others buy you… for a joke.

Then there are the royals. For crying out loud, aren’t they allowed just one day off? The Queen’s speech is leaked and dissected before it’s even broadcast. The new parents are nagged and nagged and nagged to parade their shiny plump prince for public consumption and in today’s Daily Mail they even manage to resurrect the ghost of the decade-dead Queen Mum – Gawd bless ‘er! All we need is another palace intruder story and we’ll be made up.

Also we await the reviews of the year and the predictions for what is to come. Well don’t bother because I have it all here. Are you ready? Some famous people will confess to dalliances with other famous people, much to their famous associates’ astonishment. Other less famous but fabulously wealthy persons will end up in trouble for variously buying favour/honours/influence and bringing our political/judicial/honours system into pretend disrepute. Others will call for public inquiries and the break-up of our political/judicial/honours systems. Oh and there will be an election, after which a coalition government will deliver more of the same.

There will be some sort of disease epidemic which everybody will quickly claim to have contracted and shortly thereafter there will be a ‘man’ version in a continuation of the old saw that men are incapable of bearing illness with dignity. The feminists will seize on this with glee as yet further evidence that they have not one amusing bone in their body… including, quite probably, the humerus. In other words humans will show no obvious signs of evolution, no matter how many books are published claiming otherwise; the battle of the sexes will rumble on for a good few millennia yet.

Other wars will wax and wane and the planetary total of refugees will continue to rise and one way or another they will all try to come to Europe which, by then, will have started its own little ‘warlets’ preparatory to the next ‘war to end all wars’ which, in all probability will be fought mostly by drones controlled from angry teenagers’ bedrooms. And on top of that even the weather will – by all accounts – begin dropping ordnance on us. Not content with merely forecasting the weather the climate industry, ever desperate for bigger headlines, will preface every expectation of a bit of rain or snow with the term ‘weather bomb’.

The British 'weather bomb' - same old shit

So don’t bother with the news, there is no such thing. Nothing is new under the sun, as they say. But if you do go in for perusing the headlines and especially if you are inclined to be taken in by what they say, then I have one very British piece of advice for you. Prepare for disappointment.