Feeling much better (thank you for asking), I enter 2013 with high hopes and renewed energy. Please don’t misunderstand me – 2012 wasn’t bad by any means – but I’m greatly looking forward to another year of success for the bridging industry. I also harbour a quiet but unshakeable confidence that my beloved QPR will finally silence the Doubting Thomases out there. You know who you are.

 

Each New Year is greeted with a plethora of predictions from that most nefarious of creatures, the ‘expert’. He (because it usually is a he) exists everywhere – business, sport, culture, you name it – and knows everything. They have never been more numerous; nor so vociferous. But even Clever Dicks get their comeuppance. 

 

A newspaper column I enjoy very much is the weekly Economics essay penned in the Sunday Times by the estimable David Smith. A professional economist, he possesses the all-too rare gift of making even the most arcane of subjects understandable, informative and enjoyable.

 

At the start of each year, Mr. Smith publishes a table of economic outcomes – inflation, GDP, unemployment etc. – measured against predictions made 12 months previously by a range of alleged experts. Expensively employed by blue-chip banks, finance houses and consultancies, these people have at their disposal a range of analytical tools and data Nostradamus could have only dreamt of. And guess what – they’re about as ruddy good at predicting the future as that old fraud!

 

So spare me the soothsaying. Suffice to say:

 

•    We can expect a raft of surveys from the usual suspects telling us what we already know;

 

•    There will be a tsunami of predictions from po-faced bean counters that sound more like God-given pronouncements;

 

•    But most of them will turn out to be completely wrong, allowing Mystic Meg to sleep easily;

 

•    The BBC won’t allow us to forget the 2012 Olympics, but will do all it can to move on from its ‘Now then, Now then… Ow’s About That Then?’ era;

 

•    David Cameron will get tough on Europe, crime, welfare and immigration… again;

 

•    UKIP will just sit back, watch and wait;

 

•    Ed Milliband will have his adenoids re-inserted and demand his money back;

 

•    London will ask for a referendum on independence from the UK, with Boris Johnson as its inaugural Archduke-elect;

 

•    The US will continue to cling to the edge of its fiscal cliff as the big decisions get kicked further into the long grass;

 

•    Silvio Berlusconi will be re-elected Italian prime minister on a promise of free hair transplants and discounted bunga bunga party tickets for the over-70s (but men will have to wait until 2015 for the same benefits;)

 

•    The Bridging & Commercial Awards will be the best ever, but Mo Mulki will heap further shame on the male footwear industry;

 

•    Jim Nash, Omni Capital’s very own ‘Oldest Swinger in Town’, will finally open the wallet he got for Christmas 1975 (mine’s a glass of Irish, Jimbo); and

 

•    Harry ‘Houdini’ Redknapp will lead QPR to Premier League safety, pulling off the biggest comeback since Elvis at the Horse & Groom in ’95 (mine’s a pint, Presley).

 

It’s good to be back.