Hopes and dreams for a 2018 when our long nightmare ends
COLUMNIST
Looking back, 2017 wasn’t that bad after all. I mean, it was quite bad, but as years go, 2016 took some beating.
The year of Trump’s inauguration is ending with the US recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city – if anything symbolises all that worried us about the billionaire becoming leader of the free world, it was this.
Anyway, 2018 can’t be as bad as the last couple of years, can it? Here’s my hopes and dreams for the coming 12 months. The world tackles the plastic pollution problem
One of the many great things about living in Wales is our record on recycling.
We’ve recently been named behind only Germany in the bestperforming nations in Europe on recycling. And we’re likely to overtake them soon.
But for all the strides made here, there remains a problem – a global problem – of plastic waste, which is creating a very real environmental crisis in our oceans.
For every 100m stretch of beach in the UK, there are 718 pieces of litter, according to the Marine Conservation Society. Most of that is plastic. The stuff is everywhere. And the more we consume, the more plastic we produce.
You can’t argue with the transformative effect plastic has had on the way we live. The trouble is that it will take centuries to disappear.
There’s billions of tonnes of the stuff floating in our seas, harming wildlife in a way we’d never imagine when unscrewing a bottle of pop or opening a ready-made sadnwich.
The UN’s global oceans director Lisa Svensson has warned: “This is a planetary crisis... we are ruining the ecosystem of the ocean.” Something happens to stop Brexit
Yeah, this is the feeble wish of a snowflake Remainiac.
But like countless others, I fear Brexit will be the single most damaging thing to happen to the country since the Second World War.
For every brief glimmer of light which hints at the chance of us staving off our exit from the EU, there is something else which makes the move ever closer.
But as long as we’re still in, I still have hope.
Maybe, as the scale of calamity becomes clear and as those blinkered, foolish politicians who are leading our country into disaster get shown for what they are, then the public will realise just in time that this cannot be allowed to happen.
There’ll be a collective shout of “STOP!” and everything will be OK again. Everyone enjoys the royal wedding Look, I’m no royalist. Far from it. And when it was announced Prince Harry was marrying Meghan Markle, I had to pretend I wasn’t looking up her Wikipedia entry to find out who she is (before getting lost Googling pictures of Harry’s once-luxuriant mop to see if he too has been afflicted by the Windsor family’s aggressive balding gene).
Anyway, it was nice to see other people getting excited about something in this time of worry and despair and pessimism.
So for no other reason than to see joy on the faces of others, and hear people genuinely say out loud, “Oo, there’s nice,” I’m really looking forward to next year’s royal wedding. The first thought when we wake up is not “thank God we all still exist”
I’m not sure about you, but I breathe a little sigh of relief now in the morning when I realise the world’s not ended in a cataclysmic nuclear war.
Maybe next year something will happen – I don’t know, a certain president gets indicted or something – that’ll make that end.
And then instead of waking up thinking, “Oh, we’re all still here, then,” much more mundane thoughts about breakfast will pop into our brains and life will be altogether less anxious a thing. Cardiff City get promoted
From a purely selfish point of view, it would be lovely to be celebrating a promotion in May... and seeing a Cardiff City team wearing blue in top-flight football again.