2012

This will be my last blog post this year. Tonight we go off to Scotland for a repeat of the New Year's holiday of two years ago, so no blogging again until 6 January. Which makes it the ideal time to think about the year that has gone.

All in all it was pretty up and down. On the upside, my children seem to be doing well, which always gives a good feeling, and my mother visited in June, which was a major event for someone of her age. Then there were the Olympics, which I visited in person and in which I had a family interest, since my son was in the G.B. handball squad. On the other hand, one of my best friends committed suicide around the same time, so trips to the Olympic park were interspersed with a funeral. I have wanted to write something about this for some time, but have not yet managed to. One of my New Year resolutions will be to do so in 2013.

Outside of the family, I thought that the world didn't get any better, and in some ways got decidedly worse. Wars in Syria and Afghanistan rumbled on, and will worsen in the coming years, in my view. There were bouts of madness, such as the recent shooting of all those children in America. There were continuing economic problems in both Europe and the U.S., which politicians seem incapable of solving. More fundamentally, it became increasingly clear that the whole way in which rich countries have chosen to order their societies was pretty much a house of cards. That's not going to change for a number of years. In fact, I think there may well be conflicts within societies, as the young rail against pensioners, the unemployed against those with jobs, the domestic-born against immigrants, the poor against the rich. We may have realised that the ways of the noughties were somehow not right, but we have not yet managed to replace them with an alternative.

If that all sounds rather gloomy, then it probably reflects the mood I am in these days. Let's hope that I am wrong, and that 2013 will be a better year than 2012. Happy New Year to all who read this!

Walter Blotscher