Here's To The Next One

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Another twelve-month passes and the customary hopes for a better New Year, this time round at least, are truly heartfelt and deep, mediated by the knowledge of just how precarious life really is.

We have experienced, globally a sense of restriction and powerlessness; trammelled as we have been by the invisible forces of Covid.

We have experienced globally, an awareness and greatly overdue recognition of the rights of people of all races and creeds; highlighting the institutionalised prejudices and injustice at the heart of our telling of history; a partial, wholly biassed male, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant confection born of money, privilege and exploitation.

We have experienced globally, during this pandemic, the very best of human endeavour, empathy and kindness alongside the very worst of our species' cant, hypocrisy and self-interest in politics and business worldwide. The very bastions of entitlement that formed our twisted histories and our current reactions to them have been retrenching under cover of the pandemic; indeed benefiting and profiting from it: unwilling to participate in the world they live in and seeing in it and its populations simply a source of personal gain, to be made at the expense of the rest.

It's too early to call which of these opposing sides of our collective psyche will come to the fore as 2020 fades slowly into 2021, but optimism is as I said, customary on New Years Eve; so I raise my usual glass-half-full in a toast to us all: Blwyddyn Newydd Dda and may something truly decent result from the debacle that was 2020. Stay safe out there!

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