A New Year’s attempt at optimism

Personally, I know few people who haven’t staggered out of 2023 with much the same expression as someone zig-zagging soot-faced and shocked from the smoking wreckage of their own car. 

One could say similar of the world in macro. Politics, geopolitics, economics, society have all gazed dinosaur-like at the skies and wondered what that flaming ball heading heaven to horizon was before returning heedlessly to doing dinosaur stuff.

So far so apocalyptic. But that’s easy to do, isn’t it? We’ve been at it since the Greeks invented the word. A long time ago. And yet here we still are.

Optimism then is the brief. Things to look forward to. So follow me now and mind the steps because they’re slippery.

Here, deep below the Dordogne, we find ourselves in a hitherto undiscovered chamber of the caves of Lascaux, let’s call it Lascaux V, and it lies just past the picture of an ancient bison hunt with an early environmentalist telling everyone off. 

We are among the very origins of human consciousness. Some 17,000 year-old evidence of our ancestors’ ability to think in the abstract and to see themselves as both different to and part of the inhabitants of their world. Cor. 

And here, hold the torchlight higher, scribed onto the very living rock, the earliest evidence of news. Three headlines. A Question of Sport Launched. Can Test Cricket Survive? Hopes Rise for Middle East Ceasefire. And there are, archaeologists say, signs among the fading umber of a fourth. Protestor Run Down by Rare Bison.

The very writing on the wall.

Of these, only A Question of Sport is no longer with us. It died in 2023. “Bantz” having long ago been outlawed and parlour game TV consigned, along with Ask The Family and Call My Bluff, to a time where families gathered round a single screen for a post-homework, just-in-from-the-office, Bird’s-Eye-beefburger shared experience. Hope it’s chips, it’s chips.

The rest is oft predicted but has rarely come to pass. In 1882, England’s loss to Australia was described, stand by, as “the death of Test cricket’, and from those Ashes rose… Notwithstanding one of the most compelling series in modern history last summer, those same cave artists are back at it. Former England and Australia captains Mike Atherton and Steve Waugh striking up the Greek chorus, as India’s megabucks, the IPL and the compelling briefness of the short-form game combine to suggest a tragic end to five days in the sun. 

I remain optimistic. Test cricket has become high octane and high drama. And, unless rain intervenes, now almost always produces a result. A good product, for this is what professional sport is, tends to live on and oddly, given its fossilised reputation, cricket’s ability to adapt has kept it relevant. It’s survived rebel tours, Kerry Packer, “vectors of disease” and still boundary fielders from abroad endure the wit and wisdom of the Hollies Stand come summer.   

The largesse of the Big Three (India, England and Australia) will be compelled on the basis of enlightened self-interest. No shop window, no sale. All will be well. 

More seriously, the Middle East. Dig if you will for optimism. The unfortunate fact is that “smiting” has been the custom since Biblical times. But while Israel’s righteous anger may now be putting its cause in peril, it’s notable that the Arab world has not been in a hurry to join the bundle, nor has its enthusiasm for Gaza’s diaspora been notable. 

With Gulf nations spreading their considerable global financial influence into everything from aviation to sport and the prime mover being troublesome and non-Arab Iran, who needs the aggro?

Not that this leaves the West without its problems, the rapier end of which is Houthi corsairs troubling maritime trade and the bludgeon being power bloc disruptor politics, but one could easily argue that this has given complacency a long overdue jolt and some necessary focus has been forced upon leading nations whose smugness and arcane social concerns have been misdirecting them badly. 

It is not the end of history. And never has been.

Might we get away with some optimism on “woke”? It’s an odd world that allows the boss of a FTSE company to joyfully concede that she discriminates on the basis of sex and colour in the name of diversity but, outside Aviva, the corporate world’s experience of failing ESG funds, debanking and tone deaf advertising has not been a happy one. Time to get on with the business of business?

The counter, of course, is that with a Labour government increasingly probable, we’ll all be plunged back into its penchant for sewing identity division in the name of social cohesion. Keir Starmer has knelt for plenty but stood for little.

But cause for optimism may be that a Labour government might finally be in the mood to grasp its own nettle and deal with the NHS. Wes Streeting certainly makes the right noises and the unfortunate fact is that it’s a kicked can we’ve all finally caught up with. Only they can do it without the faux indignation and tiresome ideological howl of a lobby that’s tested its righteousness to destruction. Odd to think doctors once stood against it. 

More broadly, politics is in for a shake-up. Europe which has always had a penchant for political disruption – to varying degrees of global effect – is already showing the way, leaving Britain counter cyclical in its Hobson’s choice zig to the Left while the Continent zags to the Right. 

Back home we’ve long thought ourselves immune but, between Brexit, Covid, generalised incompetence, dullness and a display of impotence in the face of events that is surely unprecedented, “something better change” to quote Guildford revolutionaries, The Stranglers. 

Step forward, or not, reluctant virgin Nigel Farage who, even as I write, is still doing a burlesque behind his feathers and teasing us over whether he will “return to frontline politics.”

Of course he bloody will.

Now, ease up, I ask you not necessarily to find optimism in the lad himself. That’s between you, the ballot box and whether you want the Conservative party to survive. But that a new dynamic to the Buggins’ turn mediocrity we’re all so heartily sick of is overdue seems beyond doubt. 

Yup, yeah, gottit, “populist”. All that. Bend the word to your own personal awl. Fact though. Farage rarely intervenes without consequence and he has a Thatcherite instinct for what people think as opposed to what Westminster would like them to believe.

Something to look forward to? Well, we’ll see. Nothing lasts forever, you know.

So, now, to get us out of this cave, if you could all just turn round, carefully, sir, so you don’t rub anything off. Ooh. That’s a new one. Soothsayer: “Never predict. Especially About Future.” 

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