On my mind

NEW Year gives us another opportunity to repeat the habits of the past and the failings of a lifetime.

Since that tends to happen for me on an annual basis I always stay up, not to greet the new year but to make sure the old one leaves.

After all, it’s been a year since I didn’t become a better person.

I no longer do new year resolutions, but I am fascinated by prophecies which come from a variety of sources – the weird, the mystical, the religious and the conspiracy theorists.

So I plunged into the murky world of divination, apocalypse and omen only to find it to be brimming with harbingers of doom foretelling cataclysm and catastrophe for 2019.

Sixteenth Century Nostradamus, not known for his cheery optimism, predicts nuclear terrorism and the outbreak of World War Three starting in France, as well as the fact that pigs will become brothers and sisters to men and women.

The so-called Nostradamus of the Balkans, Baba Vanga, who it is claimed foresaw 9/11, and the rise of ISIS, predicted that China would overtake the US as a superpower, Putin could be assassinated and “a new form of energy” will be discovered on the planet Venus.

Add to that the perennial mantras about the Illuminati, the New World Order, the Anti-Christ and the destruction of the Earth from Planet X. . . but then an extremely senior moment: these were the predictions for 2018!

They did not happen and I was still here. Phew!

Was it not Stubb in Moby Dick who said: “I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing”? I’ll take that and look forward to a whale of a time in 2019.

■ Follow Graham in 2019 on Twitter@ GeeTDee