Crystal balls – predictions for 2018

Careful - I think your ball is boiling...

Happy New Year. If you’re still trying to eat the last of the cheese from Christmas and are shocked that Creme Eggs are already in the shops, you have my sympathy.

Using my uncanny soothsaying abilities, I’ve peered hard into the mystic tea leaves and rubbed my runes to predict, with startling accuracy, what will happen during the year some are already calling 2018. You’re welcome.

January: The mists are blocking my view... looks like, possibly, someone called Eleanor will have a lot of wind early in the month? Brussels sprouts overdose, probably. Hey! It’s not my fault if this is weird – it’s just what’s going to happen, OK?

February: Love is in the air! Following a leak from a chemical plant, the fumes released caused numerous fatalities following the...

Death. Not love. Sorry. Easy to mix those two up, isn’t it?

March: Article 50 is triggered, and we can all finally get on with our lives after a painful and draining lifetime of turning on the news every night and having to listen to more depressing stuff about how badly negotiations are going.

I’ve just checked, and it looks like I got the year wrong on that. It’s 2028, not 2018. Nearly there though, eh? Chin up!

April: In a surprise move, the Divine Order of Rail Overlords increase train fares again, this time by 34%, having realised they got the decimal point wrong in January. The extra money is used by Northern Rail to upgrade their rolling stock – one of the carriages will now be from the 1980s, rather than 1970s.

May: Shockingly, a YouTube ‘celebrity’ does something entirely sensible and/or altruistic.

June: Summer! (Wasn’t hard that one.) Whilst the weather will still be miserable, the upside is you have more hours of daylight to grumble about it.)

July: Following his British Grand Prix win, Lewis Hamilton says on the podium that men who wear pink are big girls.

August: Wah! End of days! Fire and Brimstone, plagues of locusts! Wait... sorry, I had the crystal ball upside down. The Bank Holiday will be nice.

Also, some pathetic men kick off again about Doctor Who being a woman now.

September: Leaves on trees start to go brown and fall off. No-one has any idea why, or what to do about it. Or how old Bono is. Or what carpophagous means. In an entirely unrelated event, Wikipedia will be down for a couple of days.

October: Mariah Carey or Paris Hilton do something. No-one cares.

November: The winning lottery numbers on the 19th are 3, 9, 27, 29, 42 and 55. (Also, remember who told you.)

December: You will receive baffling Christmas presents from family and friends which you politely say you love, whilst wondering if they put your name on them by mistake. And Frozen is on TV. Again. Make the After Eights stop!

There you go. Good luck. Neither I nor The Mail can be held responsible for loss or injury caused by paying attention to any of this.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in The Mail, on the 5th of January 2018. It was re-titled as "The future is crystal clear"in both the print and online editions, which is fine... I liked my title better, but perhaps a touch too cheeky for them...

I wonder if any of it will turn out to be true..?

In a surprise move, I also made it into The Cumberland News this week, after their regular columnist was unable to supply their column due to illness. Haven't seen a copy yet - hopefully there's one in the post. Pretty exciting, as it has a readership in print of around 20,000. My quest to take over all Cumbrian newspapers continues.

Waiting on confirmation of something before my big(ish) announcement. Hopefully, next week!

(CD A-Z: The marvellous They Might Be Giants - "Factory Showroom".)

A fisful of change at the shops

A recent day out reminded me how much the retail experience has altered during my lifetime – and it’s not all good. I could stop typing this, and buy a fridge, in a matter of seconds. The shops are shut and it’s 9pm, but I could still place the order and arrange delivery. I haven’t got to wander round a white-goods retail emporium trying to work out which slightly different version of something that keeps my cider cold is better. It’ll be cheaper, too. But in amongst the convenience, endless choice and bargains, we’ve lost some of the personal, human, touches that used to make a trip to the shops something more than just a daily chore. Last weekend, we visited a local coastal town. Amongst the shops selling over-priced imported home accessories (who doesn’t need another roughly-hewn wooden heart, poorly painted and a bargain at £10?) was one that looked different. It’s window allowed you to see in, rather than being plastered with stick-on graphics and special offers calling ...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

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