Happy New Year? It's Hard To Tell.

In more youthful days, the New Year generally meant weeks of ruined cheques and letters as I continued, by force of habit, to write the previous year in the allotted spaces. Nowadays, life is made somewhat easier because cheques have become such a rarity and any mistakes in correspondence can be corrected by a simple click. This is just as well because the years now seem to roll by so much more quickly.

As the calendar switches over to 2017, many of us are making – then probably breaking – our New Year's resolutions. It is also traditional for columns such as this to look back at the year just gone and predict something useful for the 12 months that lie in store. Although, if the past year is anything to go by, useful predictions may be about as rare as a winter swallow.