If life was left solely up to us, I'd be worrying!

TOWARDS the end of December, veteran BBC reporter John Simpson gave this chilling assessment of 2025.

- Faith Steve Silvester

He wrote: "I've reported on more than 40 wars around the world during my career, which goes back to the 1960s. I watched the Cold War reach its height, then simply evaporate. But I've never seen a year quite as worrying as 2025 has been.This doesn't inspire optimism for 2026!

You may not be the kind of person to bother yourself with Simpson's weighty assessment. You may have a thousand reasons to be cheerful. After all, Ian Dury managed to come up with quite a list of cheer-inducing people, activities and objects when he wrote his song of that name in 1977 - the age of punk rock, high inflation, the Cold War and the Ku Klux Klan. We survived all that.