So goodbye 2016, and good riddance. Let’s pray 2017 turns out rather better – but don’t bet your house on it.

A year ago I wrote here: “Amid all the apocalyptic gloom, there is a chance – just a chance – that 2015 will be remembered as the year things started to get better. The year the world looked over the edge into the abyss … and stepped back.”

Oh dear. I could hardly know then that the popular response to reaching the cliff’s edge would not be a mere step forward, but an enthusiastic leap.

I wasn’t predicting Brexit, or a Trump presidency, but then, who was? I did, in fact, describe Trump exactly 12 months ago as “frontrunner” – because that’s what the polls said at the time – but I never imagined that would last.

History is full of events, characters and direction changes that appear inevitable in hindsight but were unpredicted, unpredictable, beforehand. I fear 2016 was one such landmark year.

Not that I entirely believe all the talk – dangerous talk – about the rise of “populism”.

Why should racism, sexism, nationalism, war-mongering violence be any more popular, or “populist”, than more valuable values? 

I’m pretty sure they’re not. The danger is that the nasty parties, having achieved slender, even debatable, victories, have taken not only power but dominance of the public debate. To criticise, even to question, their position as victors is to be shouted down, belittled, threatened.

They claim to be “the people”, as if everyone else weren’t people. But to describe the self-styled “alt-right” (a.k.a. fascists) as populist is an insult to the populace.

It’s worth remembering that Hillary Clinton, for all her considerable faults, actually got 2.9million more votes than Donald Trump. 

And that however much the government – and, shamefully, the supposed opposition – may talk of “a clear mandate” or “the will of the people”, only about a quarter of the British people actually voted to leave the European Union.

It wasn’t the people that got us into these fine messes. It was a combination of misguided leadership, misled electorates, and serious flaws of democratic process.

We are where we are. But exactly where that may be remains unclear.

Even one of the greatest of American thinkers, Noam Chomsky, appears to have had crystal ball failure. His thoughts are generally too sophisticated and complex to summarise easily, but I’ll try.

Before the US election, he said a vote for Trump would be “a vote for the end of the world” – or at least for the end of life as we know it. Irreparable damage to the biosphere, that frighteningly thin layer of soil, water and air that supports all life.

A few days after the election, Chomsky found a brighter side to look on. He suggested then that four years of Trump might prove so devastating for America in the short term that longer-term prospects for a different kind of leadership would inevitably be improved.

It may be a slender hope. It may also be the only one we have right now. But we know how inevitability has a habit of shifting its ground. And how unreliable New Year predictions are.
 
 


A 'healthy' demand for warplanes and bombs
 
 
Round about the time Boris Johnson was putting his foot in it by telling the truth about Saudi Arabia and its “proxy wars”, a business conference was taking place in Palm Beach, Florida.

In it, investors were assured that things were looking up. That the Saudis’ various adventures – and the Syrian war which has brought such horrors to Aleppo and elsewhere – were yielding what one company vice president called “indirect benefits”.

Bruce Tanner of Lockheed Martin told the Credit Suisse conference that events in Syria provided “an intangible lift because of the dynamics of that environment and our products in theatre”.

This is not a play. What he calls a theatre, the rest of us call a war zone. Which is precisely where his firm makes its profits.

Lockheed’s F-22 Raptor jet was much in evidence this past summer in the skies over East Anglia, despite its “stealth” label. Demand for it and the new F-35 is very healthy in the Middle East just now. Healthy in a business sense, that is, not in a health sense.

At the same conference, head honchos for other military manufacturers were upbeat too. Raytheon’s CEO Tom Kennedy reported “a significant uptick” for “defence solutions across the board in multiple countries in the Middle East”. 

“It’s all the turmoil they have going on,” he explained, “whether the turmoil’s occurring in Yemen, whether it’s with the Houthis, whether it’s occurring in Syria or Iraq, with Isis.”

It’s an ill wind, and all that. And it’s not just the Yanks making a killing.

We may not share the Americans’ insane attitude to guns in our own homes and streets. But we still get a significant slice of our national income from making and flogging weapons for use elsewhere.

Britain is now officially the world’s second largest arms exporter. Which is why Boris got so roundly ticked off for upsetting the Saudis, now the world’s largest arms importer.

Doesn't it just make you proud to be British, and glad that we're "taking back control"?

As the thin treble voice rose high to the hammerbeam roof, the hairs on the back of my neck twitched. The first notes of the traditional carol service opener, Once in Royal David’s City, had brought back a long-forgotten memory.

I don’t think it was a memory I’d suppressed, merely one I’ve had little use for this past half-century or so. It was of a very young me, aged perhaps six or seven, giving the same solo in another medieval church.

And with it – as with so many old memories – came a fleeting sense of the different me that young person might have grown up to be.

It’s a very long time since I sang a solo. Never, certainly, since my voice broke. It’s quite some time since I sang much at all. These days, if I do, it’s in a croaky, uncertain bass baritone very unlike the boy treble I once was.

I don’t go to church – never did, really. I do go to churches. We are very lucky in East Anglia to have such a wealth of wonderful medieval churches. Sometimes I go just to enjoy the history, the architecture, the art. To commune with our ancestors. Such pleasures are usually best taken privately.

But the acoustics in these old buildings are often gorgeous too, and there’s no better way to appreciate that than at a good school carol concert.

This one, though, was a little different for me. Partly because it was the first for years without my mother, who always loved them. And who, incidentally, used to write and produce all the nativity pageants I took part in during my primary school days.

Partly because this was the last one in which I’ll get to see and hear my daughter perform before she leaves school.

At the end, as always, the vicar said a short prayer. And, as always, he made it clear that he was addressing us all, of whatever religion or none. Aware that it was the singing, and our children, that brought us together, not any belief in a specifically Christian message.

There was a message all right, though – a jolly good message we could all say a hearty amen to. 

It began with a plea to his God: “Save us from hypocrisy.”

The hypocrisy, that is, that lets us sing carols, swap presents and sit down to a sumptuous Christmas lunch then return to a daily life in which we do nothing for the poor and meek of the world.

All fair enough, and all fairly standard – the kind of thing I’ve heard all my life, and would probably have heard more often if I were a regular churchgoer. I’m sure something very similar must have been intoned by another vicar at that long-ago carol service where I sang my solo.

This Christmas in particular, though, the good reverend might have brought his point home more forcefully.
Something, perhaps, about homeless Middle-Easterners being callously turned away because there’s “no room”…
 
 
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The music world has lost some fine people in 2016. David Bowie and Leonard Cohen both bowed out with typical cool, leaving us in each case with their best album in decades. Albums that meet death head-on, with powerful self-awareness and composure.

Possibly less meaningful, but maybe more enjoyable, now comes another startling return to musical form. And that from a bunch of old geezers who seem to defy the odds merely by being still alive.

Who’d have thought, back in the 1960s when The Rolling Stones were young and rebellious, a deliberate offence to the parental generation, that they’d be pitching an album at the Christmas market in 2016?

Never mind that Mick Jagger, at 73, would be fathering a child two years younger than his great-grandson.

When I read a few weeks ago that Blue & Lonesome was coming, I groaned inwardly. I wondered when the corporate juggernaut would finally grind to a halt. The strange thing, now we’ve heard it, is that it’s such fun. The kind of thing you’d have expected from the young Stones, not the grandad band they are.

The two best new blues albums I’ve heard in many years both came out in 2016. Both, oddly, slightly disturbingly, by white artists born middle-class and now stinking rich, who couldn’t possibly know what it’s like to live in the kind of poverty and deprivation that gave birth to the blues.

Still, here are the Stones, as if reborn. And even better – my favourite album of the year by far – is Blues of Desperation by Joe Bonamassa. The former child prodigy is 39 now, which means he was about a year old when the Stones last made a really good record.

As the great Willie Nelson (still going strong at 83) put it: Gee, ain’t it funny, how time slips away…

I have a choice question for you – you could even call it multiple choice. Just how much choice is good for you? How much do you actually need – or want?

Well, OK, I guess it depends what you’re choosing between.

Life or death? For most people the answer to that one is pretty obvious, at least for a good span of years and until a satisfactory conclusion seems to have been reached. Which might be at, say, 90 – though I’ll happily take longer if I’m still in decent physical and mental shape.

Red or green jelly-baby? Neither for me, thanks, but if you like them, does it matter which?

Between those two extremes lies a massive range of choices we’re all expected to be making all the time.

What are you going to study at university? It didn’t occur to me until I was already there that I could have chosen not to go to uni at all. And if that assumption was relatively uncommon back in the 1970s, it’s one most teenagers nowadays seem to face.

Where do you want to live, what sort of job do you want, what kind of holiday? Most of us, depending on circumstances, generally have some degree of choice in such things. And so we should, perhaps. Up to a point.

I was reasonably happy to choose my camera and my car, though the available choice in both is far wider than it needs to be.

When it comes to choosing a computer, the varieties and variations you have to choose between are enough to bring on a kind of brain-freeze.

And if I ever enter a supermarket (never through choice), I’m put in mind of a line from Barbara Kingsolver’s brilliant novel The Poisonwood Bible. “But, Aunt Adah, how can there be so many kinds of things a person doesn’t really need?”

The range of choice between near-identical commodities feels like a form of mental illness. What breakfast cereal do you want? None of them, thanks, I’ll bake my own bread for toast, just get me out of here.

I think it was in that dismal decade the 1980s that we began to be force-fed the idea that choice was always a good thing. Tony Blair and his cronies took the idea and ran with it, as they did most Thatcherite bad ideas.

Most people under about 45 have probably never even doubted the choice mantra. They won’t remember a time when there were no organisations called Offthis and Ofthat to ensure competition between rival providers of what the state used to provide.

To ensure that the poor bewildered citizen had a choice. As if they wanted one.

What hospital do you want to go to? I don’t care – I just want to get there quickly and have the best possible treatment when I do.

What school will you send your children to? I’d just like the local one to be good, thanks, and not have to make that choice.

I’d certainly rather children weren’t being bussed from one town to another, while others are making the same journey in the opposite direction. I’m glad my daughter can walk to school, and that many of her friends are within walking distance too. It’s a huge advantage that I never had beyond the age of 11 – not because there was a great choice in schooling back then, but because my parents chose to live in a village, not a town.

It amuses me when I get to London and the disembodied voice of the train conductor thanks me for travelling with Greater Anglia – as if there were any other choice from here. And no, I’m not suggesting different companies should run parallel tracks.

I’m not advocating an even greater network of pipes and cables, either.

Who do you want to buy electricity from? As if there was more than one mains supply in the street outside your home. Your gas, your water, your phone connection?

They never stop telling us to exercise our right of choice. To switch. But of course most people never do. Who really wants to spend hours every year or so trying to compare?

As it happens, the choice between energy suppliers is one I do make. I choose to buy from a company that invests only in renewables, not fossil or nuclear power. But the comparison we are constantly urged to make is based on price-tag alone.

Which is not surprising. To the fetishists of choice, Money is the One True God.

And money is the reason, too, why you can spend so much of your life flicking through TV menus trying to choose between hundreds of channels, nearly all of them showing nothing but rubbish. And advertising.

There is another way, too, in which freedom of choice isn’t quite as desirable as it’s cracked up to be. It applies to TV, and it applies in spades to the internet. And it was well described by that justly popular scientist Brian Cox in a recent interview in the Irish Times.

“Choice implies ghettoisation to some extent,” he said. “So what we’re seeing is these echo chambers where people only choose to listen to people who agree with them.”

These echo chambers amplify so-called populism of the kind that led to Brexit and Trump. While at the same time they give Labour supporters of Jeremy Corbyn the illusion that he can be the next prime minister. If it is an illusion – and I’m afraid all recent evidence from outside the echo chamber suggests  it is.

The national press has always had this kind of effect, though it seems to be getting worse. You know roughly how a regular Daily Mail reader will think – if you can call it thinking – and it won’t be the same way a Guardian reader does.

Or, probably, a reader of this blog. Which is one advantage of regional papers, like the one most of the words above made their first appearance in. Because they are chosen by geography, not politics, their readers have a chance of meeting opinions they don’t already hold. Like mine, perhaps.

Wonderful as programmes like Planet Earth II are, you can enjoy wildlife without the intermediary of David Attenborough, high-definition TV cameras and crews camping out for months in exotic locations. 

I encountered something heartwarming and nostalgic as I walked the dog the other day. A large flock of birds was wheeling above the river, silhouetted dark against the sky, then suddenly all flashing white in the low sun as they turned together. Lapwings. 

When I was a kid, every ploughed field in East Anglia seemed to have its resident lapwing flock. Beautiful birds, distinctive in appearance, flight and that call which gives them their other name, peewit. These days, though I quite often see the odd one or two probing the mud along the river shore, the appearance of large numbers together is rare enough to cause comment.

The lapwing is so significant in English country lore that it has its own law – the Lapwing Act of 1926, which banned the collection of its eggs for food. That habit was common enough to have caused a decline in lapwing numbers, which picked up again after the act was passed. Since then, however, changes in land-drainage, ploughing, field sizes – and especially the use of agrochemicals – have hit peewit populations hard. What was once one of Britain’s commonest birds is now reduced to red list status for conservation concern. Since 1960, its numbers have fallen by 80 per cent.

But they are still out there, a sight and a sound to lift the spirits.

And so are the rooks, as ever at this time of year, gathering in their chosen fields like delegates at a conference.
What do they all talk about at these important, well-attended meetings? And how do they select the venue?

Don’t think I’m being over-imaginative, either, in describing them as talking to each other. This is not anthropomorphism, it’s observation.

Some years ago my attention was caught by a fight going on, high above me, between a rook and a sparrowhawk. A second rook joined in – then almost immediately left again, flying fast and straight towards a distant wood. Within a couple of minutes it was back with reinforcements, maybe 20 other rooks. Exit sparrowhawk, as rapidly as may be.

Now tell me rooks don’t talk to each other. What else can you call communication of that kind? The cawing of a rookery may just be rather charming noise to us, but I have no doubt it has meaning to them.

Like all the corvids – crows, jays, magpies, jackdaws – they are far more intelligent than our study of brain size and shape suggests they should be. Which says more about our understanding of the brain than it does about the birds.

That rook encounter, though memorable, was far from being the only conflict I’ve witnessed between hawks and other birds. The preyed-upon, or those whose chicks may become prey, don’t like raptors. And even quite small birds can be valiant defenders.

I’ve seen a hedge appear to explode with tits and finches fleeing from a sparrowhawk that came down from the sky like a bomb. I’ve also watched from my dining-room window  another sparrowhawk being driven off by a small group of determined blackbirds.

Last summer, in Orkney, I saw a single plucky oystercatcher risking its life in driving away that most savage of sea-going pirates, a great skua.

Closer to home, on another riverside dog-walk, I was startled recently to see a buzzard –a very large bird, and well armed – fly past me fast at head-height, pursued by a single angry crow.

A few weeks back I watched another crow engaged in a long, almost balletic, aerial dispute with a kestrel. I didn’t see the outcome of that confrontation, as the two wheeled away out of sight, still locked in combat.

Most remarkable of all, perhaps, I was watching a buzzard recently circling over the river near my home. Suddenly it dropped, in a hunting manoeuvre that just failed as a redshank flying low over the river dived into the water to escape. Redshanks are waders, not swimmers – their spindly legs and feet are not designed for swimming – but it was a lifesaving move to land in midstream, well out of its depth.

I’d never seen anything like it before. It may have been a rare event – or a commonplace occurrence in the world of birds. That wonderful, strange world that goes on all the time, all around us.

You don’t need the telly. You only have to keep your eyes open to witness marvels. What happens in the mountains, the forest, the desert, happens right among us too. Life-and-death struggles between hunter and prey. Parent birds of both kinds working hard to rear, feed, teach and protect their young.

Keep your attention at street level, or on your smartphone, and you might never know what you’re missing.


Meanwhile, on an HD screen near you...


It’s an unusual experience for me to be part of one of TV’s biggest audiences – though I did get drawn into the later rounds of the latest Bake Off. But no series, surely, has so thoroughly deserved its viewing figures as Planet Earth II.

Even more certainly, there can never have been better use made of the modern wonder of HD filming and broadcast.

From close-ups of lemurs in Madagascar to penguins struggling on Antarctic cliffs; from rare Himalayan snow leopards to tiny, near-transparent rain forest frogs; from young ibex gambolling about vertical slopes to an Amazon jaguar killing a large caiman (or croc, to me and you). That baby iguana running for its life from the pursuing snakes. That gangly giraffe kicking out against an ambushing lioness. Those shimmering hummingbirds.

We’ve long grown used to seeing stunning footage from the BBC wildlife unit set up by David Attenborough more than 50 years ago. But this series has raised the bar for stunning. Again.

The term “national treasure” is much over-used, especially of TV celebrities. But if anyone deserves the title, it’s Attenborough. In fact, if the title of British President were available, there couldn’t possibly be a better candidate. (Though if it were, I’d fear the danger of ending up with a President Clarkson. We might once have had a President Savile.)

Throughout my life, Attenborough has been not only the great entertainer, but the great educator. A man whose knowledge and enthusiasm have guided my own, and that of millions, more than almost anyone.
And over all the years, the underlying message of all his glorious programmes hasn’t changed. Only become more vital, more urgent.

It is that there’s a world full of wonders out there. Beautiful, incredibly varied and endlessly fascinating life. Independent of humanity. Except that humanity, in its spread and its ingenuity, now has the capacity to destroy it all.

And in its carelessness, selfishness, recklessness – our clever stupidity – threatens to do so.