Welcome to my blog. I am a former local journalist who now works in PR and a Conservative and community activist in Woking and Horsell. This blog will keep updated on local issues as well as my interests and quirky news stories.
Well that’s it, it’s now 2010 and a very Happy New Year to you. It’s been a fantastic New Year’s Day – a bit chilly but lovely and sunny and if you’ve been walking on the common today, I hope you enjoyed the midwinter stillness as I did.
It’s going to be a busy year. I hope by the end of it, the country will be going in a different direction, I will be happily married and have done justice to my election campaign, whatever the outcome. There are also one or two other things that I hope will also go my way too – but more of those if and when they happen.
What I’m not going to do is try to predict what 2010 – or the 2010s – will bring. I find this kind of filler journalism very annoying – and it doesn’t cover very well for the fact that no-one’s in the office today and they’ve had to get all the material written by other people. The truth is that at the beginning of 2000 we had no idea that September 11 would happen just 21 months later and change the landscape of world affairs for the decade.
At any time - and not just at the beginning of decades – a major event could occur to change world history and the direction of humankind. In 2001, it was tragic not only that 3,000 people were killed in the September 11 bombings but that event gave a definition – The War on Terror – to the whole decade that followed. The 2000s have been characterised as a bad decade, associated with slaughter in the Middle East and an escalation of the extremist Christian/Islamic tensions as well as economic mismanagement and failure.
That may be so, but for me the 2000s were all about my 20s and I enjoyed them nevertheless. What I do know about them is that a) I would never have imagined on January 1, 2000 that a few months later a terrorist group would bring down one of the world’s most iconic structures using hijacked passenger airplanes and b) that money invested in the FTSE-100 on that day would be worth less on December 31, 2009. Therefore predicting the future is, at best, a vanity.
While September 11 and recession are serious subjects, scaling things down a little I think part of the fun of life is not knowing what comes next. We all accept our inevitable milestones – marriage, births, deaths, promotions and life goals, although some are less welcome than others. But the bits that come in between - the unforseen opportunities and challenges – are what make life vivid and test our morals, abilities and fibre.
Long may they remain unforseen, even by BBC journalists.
