WE might still be in 2010, but let’s face it, the last week of the year always feels like sitting in the bath after all the water’s run out.

It’s strange how we organise events and focus our lives on specific calendar events. Despite its religious significance for birth and life going forward, Christmas has become probably the most celebrated end stop.

The Tommies setting off for the trenches of the First World War left home with the confident expectation that it would all be over by Christmas. Traditionally TV pulls off its boots in the run-up to Christmas, so we saw the end of the line – literally – for a couple of Coronation Street characters. Ann Widdecome bundled off Strictly and a new Apprentice was hired.

With a lead-time longer than any Melvyn Bragg programme trail, all life appears predicated and bound by Christmas: deliveries from a supplier, jobs you need doing, meetings with business colleagues – even friends are conveniently diaried for ‘after Christmas’. This normally means well into the new year, as most of us prefer to look forward to opening the pages of a pristine agenda when all the celebrations are over and we’ve got to knuckle down once again to the daily grind.

There is no question that in our increasingly demanding 24/7 world, there are benefits to be gained from this annual heaven-sent opportunity to stop and think.

Families and loved ones are inevitably brought together. It provides a seasonal benchmark to highlight deserving issues which during the year slip below the public radar. The care of disadvantaged children or of the elderly and vulnerable adults gains a particular focus.

Those concerned with animal welfare also use the Christmas period to highlight the responsibilities of guardianship. It is a social reality check, and maybe an important antidote to all the entreaties to splurge every last remaining penny on the Christmas sales.

For the media, the last week of the year, while we’re all shedding our old snake-skins, will normally offer the opportunity to fill column inches with the inevitable reviews and predictions. This year Santa provided an unprecedented opportunity to interrupt the predictable and indulge in a running story filled with clichés, contradicting emotions and unpredictability.

The season of goodwill and cheer collided with human misery, particularly for travellers, as a result of the unseasonal arrival of just the sort of deep and crisp and even snowfall every headline writer or romantic would have been dreaming about. Nevertheless, like the majority of the TV Christmas Specials providing the background to our traditional consumption of turkey and plum pudding, most – as they used to say on Blue Peter – were made earlier.

SO we arrive once again at the junction between years zero and one, the numbers which carry our digital signals in the electronic media. We have emerged relatively unscathed from the digital TV switchover; we can only hope that the potentially far more disruptive introduction of digital radio, scheduled for 2015, is either delayed or at least managed with the utmost sensitivity.

However, we did receive something of a shock back in April that whatever technical transmission we come up with, nature can put asunder. The eruption of Iceland’s unpronounceable Eyjafjallajokull volcano interrupted air traffic control systems, grounding commercial aviation across Europe and dealing a blow to trade and travel. Meanwhile, in our own back yard, we spent the year doing our bit for the atmosphere by constructing our own fiery furnace to the gods of vanity and consumption.

We never got far away from the power and influence of services delivered through air and space. The government issued scary warnings about cyberthreats to the nation’s security. Retailers bewailed how much trade seeped away from the high streets to online computer keyboards.

And then there was the wholesale exposure of embarrassing diplomatic chit-chat, courtesy of a disgruntled GI, and posted worldwide.
Given the number of financial transactions conducted via the internet, you might feel either reassured that world business has appeared so robust, or terrified for its vulnerability.

However, back on terra firma the focus on the finance industry remained on the perceived iniquities of its bonus culture, which like a giant bouncy castle has withstood most of the righteous indignation directed against its battlements.
Not surprisingly, economics and politics have influenced our collective well-being more comprehensively than any other factors. This year may have seemed grim, but we’ve only heard the talk – next year comes the action.

In the UK it’s VAT up to 20%, confusing signals from within an increasingly uneasy coalition government and the prospect of those public cuts starting to bite.

Here, a rise in GST to 5%, a sustained challenge to zero-ten (and I’m not talking about those little radio signals) and a general election, which despite all the rhetoric and threats to mete out retribution to all States Members who didn’t do as we wanted, will return pretty well the same team to their seats in the Chamber.

We may have seen the end of the Marilyn show on the pier, but it’s not all bad. The announcement of forthcoming royal nuptials promises an interval of warm excuses for nationwide jollity. Statistics will show local students achieving better-than-ever public exam results – they always do. Waitrose is on the way and the recent cold snap has allayed the fears of immediate annihilation by climate change.

As we prepare to flip the diary page and ring in the new, probably the one certainty for 2011 is that, like the weather, it’s what we don’t know that is likely to exert the greatest effect.
Bonne Année!