Predictions for 2021? I have only hopes... for life to again be normal
IN the news vacuum which traditionally attends the festive season, newspaper pages such as this one are often filled with wry predictions for the year ahead. Perhaps you might enjoy hearing some of the prophecies I made last year. I foretold of a world where American voters contrived to let Donald Trump loose on their country for a second term, and where the Scottish international football team’s failure to qualify for a tournament – any tournament, even a darts one – would continue apace. These, I now accept, were bum steers.
The 2020 I had in mind was one where Alexa r equisitioned our telephone banking passwords and PIN numbers and, for our own protection against fraud, refused to share them even with us. Wrong again. A year on, Alexa is still not clever enough to grasp simple instructions to play The Beatles.
And nowhere in my guidance notes for 2020 did I allude to the events which would dominate the news agenda – a global pandemic, loo roll shortages, Nicola Sturgeon getting her own TV show…
It is for two reasons that I offer no confident forecasts for the year in prospect. The first is that the present festive season is hardly the stuff of news vacuums.
Today, for example, is Day One of Brexit – our first few hours as former members of the European club of nations whose influence over our destiny has represented a fault line in British politics for decades.
Transition period over, deal done, today we get on with it.
Today, too, we wonder who our firstfoot will be – and, more to the point, which month of the year it will be before they are permitted to cross the threshold of our front doors.
Indeed, on this first day of the year, we may cast our minds back 12 months and wonder how the devil 2020 spun so wildly out of control, how we found ourselves living through times when Hogmanay was effectively banned and the traditional New Year salutation and hand-shake carried a dire health warning.
TRUTH be told, what we are experiencing is not so much the antithesis of a news vacuum as a whole other news dimension.
How unthinkable a year ago that a law would prohibit us from leaving our local authori ty areas, that I would be permitted to wish my daughter a happy new year from a distance of six feet or more – and only then if the greeting were extended outside.
The second reason for avoiding forecasts for 2021, then, is it seems I am off my game.
Instead, let me limit myself to three wishes for the year ahead and see if, buried in the debris of 2020, there are grounds for fancying they may come true.
First, I wish for the day in 2021 when coronavirus’s bleak reign is at an end.
It may be pie in the sky to imagine our lives a year from now being entirely restored to their pre-Covid settings, but there are grounds for optimism that some approximation of the dimension we once lived in is there blinking at us in the future’s mists.
Two vaccines approved by the UK regulator now attend to our rescue and, like passengers on a stricken ocean liner, we wait our turn and cross fingers that it arrives before further misfortune does.
Tied into this wish, of course, are myriad by-products.
I wish to hand over my father’s 2020 Christmas present in person during 2021 and, for the f i rst time i n the best part of a year, to shake his hand. And, though the big guy and I were never natural exponents of the male-on-male hug, I wish that to be an option again.
Some time in 2021, I wish to renew my membership of a live audience. The l ast time I watched a stage performance of any kind was in mid-March when, I seem to remember, there was a paucity of legroom in the auditorium. Well, I wish i t to be known that f ew discomforts are as intolerable as going without entirely.
Losing the opportunity to sit together and watch skilled people perform was, for me, one of the greatest wrenches of 2020. For the performers themselves, it was a protracted introduction to an artistic abyss.
In the year ahead, we sorely need art in a more social form than that consumed nightly in front of the TV under the strictures of lockdown.
My second core wish for 2021 is for Brexit to succeed.
It may suit politicians with narrow agendas to wish chaos and misery on their countryfolk in order that they may say they told them so. This, you will have noted, is by now the default position of the SNP in respect of practically any Westminster- l ed policy which affects Scots.
It is the kind of thinking which had Nationalist MPs voting en bloc this week against Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal, when the alternative was the No Deal the party had warned would be disastrous for Scotland.
My wish is that people like me who voted against Brexit rise above the petty party political point-scoring the SNP invites us to partake in and accept that, f or better or worse, this is the future we have chosen.
Many hard-line Remainers with Nationalist sympathies may consider that a bridge too far – insulting, even, in the light of the shambolic run-up to today’ s formal kiss-off with Europe.
YET it i s hardly a stretch, is it, to imagine a near-identical plea coming f r om Nationalist politicians in the event of an independence vote which went their way?
However you voted, the script would read, it is time to put our differences behind us and pull together as one proud nation to make independence a success.
Though politicians may be dishonest with us in 2021, let us be honest with ourselves. Theirs is a game of part-time principles and oratories howled down by opponents one minute and shamelessly borrowed the next.
My final wish for 2021 is Godspeed to Joe Biden on his way to the White House.
WE have emerged from a year of almost unremitting awfulness but among the few chinks of light was the presidential election of November which defied my prediction and, more importantly for the planet, promised the return of a measure of grace to its most powerful political office.
I count the days to the current incumbent’s departure – whether under his own steam or with a gentle nudge from the US military – and predict that this will be one of 2021’s better moments.
Of course, if we have learned anything in 2020, it is that even 12-month chunks of our lives are unpredictable. Who knows where we will be in another 12? Let us hope at the very least that it finds us in a better, safer place than this New Year’s Day.
Let us hope that the very basics – the handshakes, the hugs and the j oy of being among family and friends – are restored. And let hope light the way on our journey back to how it used to be. Happy New Year. We deserve it.