The new year, not unexpectedly, brings with it the usual freight of human folly. The news is generally skewed towards the negative, as this tends to attract more attention than feel-good stories. They appeal to the pessimist in all of us. There are plenty of good news stories about but they usually only get dragged out at the end of a news bulletin, or are buried somewhere deep inside the newspaper. It's as if we can't quite trust any positive turn of events, a kind of perverse inversion of the idiom about dark clouds - the silver lining is an illusion, after all.

The assassination of an Iranian general, a retaliatory strike on US Iraqi bases, and the the likely accidental shooting down of a 737-800 in Iran are just a few of the cheery offerings served up at the beginning of January, with more to come. The bush-fires at home continue to linger dangerously and may well do a lot more damage if weather conditions encourage them sufficiently. And royal watchers have a lot to digest with Harry and Meghan, bowing out. Of course, the latter might be seen as good news. It depends on who is reading the story.

Let's hope we don't meet with another major war this year. The problem of war seems unsolvable - short of some Divine of alien intervention - humans fail to learn, or forget what they have learnt. Each new year is a commitment to bright new personal goals and a yearning that things will change, even in the tiniest way. The truth is more prosaic, though in the following lines, a tad poetic.


"Delighted with their takings, bars
Are closing under fading stars;
The revellers go home to change
Back into something far more strange,
The tightened self in which they may
Walk safely through their bothered day,
With formal purpose up and down
The crowded fatalistic town."


from, New Year Letter

W.H. Auden