Happy New Year!

Something that really touched me today was an article in the Cambridge Evening News by Jack Grove about a Muslim optician who not only overrode the Tesco computer system to get a pair of glasses to a dying Christian man in time for him to see the England/South Africa Boxing Day cricket game, but paid for it out of his own pocket. It was a good end to the year news-wise.

There seems to be a fad for putting 10 predictions for 2010 online, so here's mine.

• The Large Hadron Collider at CERN will announce the existence of the Higgs Boson, only for leaks to reveal that interpretations of results were premature.
  
  
• A new series of Star Trek - The Next Generation will be filmed.
  
  
• The BBC licence fee will become a tax imposed on all instead of payable only by television owners in anticipation of a victory by the Conservatives, who have sworn to "tear up the BBC Charter". This will cause a tax revolt by people unhappy with the Corporation's toxic values.
  
  
• JK Rowling will announce she is starting work on a new series of books about Harry and Ginny Potter's children.
  
  
• Unhappiness with "green taxes" will boil over as the anthropogenic climate change continues to disintegrate.
  
  
• Chaos will ensue among athletes training for the 2012 Olympics at London as the International Olympic Committee announces it is considering legalising some substances presently banned - probably including recombinant growth hormone - under standardised conditions.
  
  
• US president Barack Obama's advisors will suggest that he consider Great Britain as a country friendly to terrorists.
  
  
• Anime films from Japan will start to be routinely shown in mainstream European and American cinemas.
  
  
• The Queen will take part in a ceremony at Westminster Abbey confirming that Great Britain is a Christian country.
  
  
• Life will go on.

We're having some friends round tonight; it'll be sad without Professor Calculus, who last Hogmanay left our jaws hanging open when he lectured our French friend Amata about "that idiot Napoleon". But we'll raise a glass to his memory, and will sing what verses we remember of Auld Lang Syne upon the bells.

So, depending where you are, I hope you had, are having or will have a Happy New Year.