New year has much to live up to, given desire to leave horrors of 2020 behind

Not being one who tends to dwell on the concept of “the good old days” I like to think that, for an old bird, I have quite a forward-looking approach to life and still have a bit of a life left to look forward to, Covid notwithstanding.

I am, after all, well ancient enough to recall the Dickensian days of the three-day week, Black Wednesday, the winter of discontent and “Crisis? What crisis?”

All things, as George Harrison once so sagely remarked, must pass…

Winter is a time consisting almost equally of peaks and troughs. It’s kind of like a wonky rollercoaster that occasionally hits the heights but makes its biggest impression when it plunges you into the depths that you know in your head are built into and, indeed, are the whole point of the general experience.

But that, nevertheless, also tends to mean that such plummeting still comes as a surprise when your battered interior races up to meet your cranium in a manner that was never intended either by evolution or intelligent design. You knew it was coming but you just didn’t quite understand what it was really going to be like. Hauntingly familiar, isn’t it…

And speaking of seeing it coming, I hate to come over all Senna the Soothsayer on you (1970s popular culture reference – Up Pompeii, F Howerd, “And it came to pass…”, “Woe, woe and thrice woe!” You get the picture…) But who didn’t know there was going to be a second Covid wave that would be worse than the first?

It’s all very well making excuses all over the shop about how nobody could have seen it coming, you would have needed a crystal ball to predict it, it couldn’t have been foreseen, but I for one distinctly remember our much-derided scientific community raising its collective hand round about June and saying, hesitantly, in face of the “It’ll be all over by Christmas” bombast: “Er, I think you’ll find…”

It’s like those who failed to acknowledge the scale of difficulties (Extra paperwork? Red tape? Traffic jams? How very dare you!) to be faced by air travellers and the haulage industry after the “getting done” of our tariff and restriction-free Brexit deal.

I freely admit that few far-sighted sages really expected that the Dutch, of all nations, would grow a cheeky sense of humour and get their border patrols to go about giggling and confiscating contraband ham and cheese butties but there you go. You take your fun where you can find it these days.

And who could have predicted private companies making vast profits out of what

used to be properly-provided public services? I’m just waiting for Boris Johnson to abandon Churchill and let loose his inner Harold Macmillan. “You’ve never had it so good?”

Depends who he’s talking to, obviously. Getting over the start of any year is an uphill struggle at any time but 2021 is already proving to be a law unto itself, in spite of the encouraging rollout of the family of coronavirus vaccines.

It had, it must be said, far too much hype to live up to in the first place, given the horrors of 2020 and our perfectly understandable desire to get shot of it.

Things, after all, could only get better. Couldn’t they? D:ream on, as it turns out.

OK, we’re only 18 days into 2021 and it’s not all doom and gloom, though you’d be hard pushed to excavate much jollity from the increasingly deep slag heap of lockdown Mark 3.

It comes to something when you can’t even take away takeaways.

But if all goes according to plan (as I write this) we will at least be rid of the worst excesses of Trump in a couple of days’ time, with the impeachment-led prospect of him being disbarred from public office forever and banned from social media.

Existing social media, that is. That’s not to say he can’t set up some kind of private vision of communications hell and attempt to inflict it on the rest of us but, as the former president himself has discovered to his cost, you can’t win ’em all.

Then there’s the aforementioned vaccine. When even the somewhat morose but generally well-informed Jason Leitch,

Scotland’s national clinical director, is coming over all chipper about the general handling of this particular process, a wee jig of limited joy round your self-isolating living room might just be allowed.

As for dwelling on “the good old days”, well, that has become a major government policy. Looking back in anger has been replaced by looking back in delusion.

The prime minister in particular has been exposed as the political equivalent of the cavalier pedestrian who steps blithely out in front of oncoming traffic because he thinks that if he doesn’t look at it, it won’t hit him.

Like many, I fear that the inevitable collision will, like the threat of the Victorian father to beat some sense into his recalcitrant offspring, hurt us more than it hurts him.

ALL THINGS PASS: Those of a certain age can draw on the experience of getting through tough times such as the 1972 power cuts.