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".)

Going Underground

The US presidential election and Brexit must have made me more nervous than I’d realised. It seems I’ve created an underground bunker without realising I was doing it. Still – we’ve all done that at some point, right? No? Ah... In that case, the fact that I have inadvertently turned my cellar into a rudimentary survival shelter, just in case it all kicks off, demonstrates a severe case of bunker mentality. Fretting about Donald and his wall, and Hillary and her emails, clearly made me more paranoid that I thought about the possibility of WW3 kicking off. Whilst attempting to find a specific size of imperial washer the other day (turns out I’d mis-filed it in the nut cabinet – Tsk!) I was struck by what a lot of jam and chutney we have in the cellar. And I do mean a LOT. There are boxes of boiled-up sugar and fruit and more boxes of boiled up vinegar and fruit. We’re still only part way through 2015’s output too. Then there’s the plastic containers holding pasta in various for...

Faking it for real

As Donald “I’m really great, everybody says so” Trump is so fond of pointing out, there is a lot of fake news around nowadays. Honest. Your friends at Facebook think so too, and have recently been publishing their top tips for spotting false news – by placing them as ads in newspapers. Considering they came in for considerable criticism themselves, that’s like shouting “Squirrel!” and pointing at a tree whilst you hastily kick away the prize begonias you just trampled. To help you make sense of this (and because I’m a caring person), I thought I’d run you through their suggestions and help to explain them for you. I know. I’m lovely. 1. Be sceptical of headlines READING THIS ARTICLE WILL IMPROVE YOUR SEX LIFE!!! And explain that catchy headlines, or stuff all in capitals might be a bit iffy. 2. Look closely at the URL You can find out more about this at www.wowyouregullible.com if you want to understand how phony web addresses are a sure sign of dodgyness. 3. Investigate...

Is it cold? Snow way...

Lunch out? Not unless you want snow balls... I’ve got a confession to make. Lean in a bit, because I’m going to whisper it. Bit more. Did you have curry for tea? OK, good. I’m a weather nerd. There, I said it. When I was growing up, I didn’t want to be an astronaut or a fireman – I wanted to present the weather on the TV. I was lining myself up for a career at the Met Office when, at about 18 years of age, I discovered I was allergic to studying. Anyway, despite a jam-packed and varied career over the subsequent years, I still have a fascination for the world of meteorology. I even have one of those clocks that projects the time and the external temperature onto the ceiling at night, so I can see how cold it is outside whilst lying awake worrying that I might have wasted my life and been more successful with girls if I’d been more into cars than clouds. So far this year, I’ve gazed at a chilly reading of -5C a couple of times, and been grateful for previous sensible ch...

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