What do I know will happen this year ? What can I say confidently, with 100% certitude and on a stack of Bibles, or on oath before Judge and Jury, will take place ? What events, what things, will be in Churchill's word,"...the dreary steeples..." that will punctuate this year as much as they did last year and as they are fated to do until the end of time ?

Prophecy is futile, after all, it only ever suggests possibility; these are decreed events as if by a Higher Authority. They cannot be mitigated. They will take place.

And they are ?

Firstly, the Daily Mail will be as choleric and as red in the face as it always is. It's front page puce with rage, bellowing in the boldest font, with headlines full of emotion and trigger words, on what it pronounces to be Government pusillanimity or gutlessness; or when its neither of those, then the arrogance and contempt they forever accuse the Government of displaying. There'll be denunciations about Europe; tirades flung at the EU, and Brussels - their metaphor for all that is evil and unconstitutional. Angry statements on how our liberties will be subsumed and disappear.

Oh, The Daily Mail loves to pronounce on our Ancient Liberties. I'd like to know exactly what they were. I somehow don't think my peasant forebears were graced with fruits of universal suffrage, a notion I believe usually accompanies the concept of liberty. And unconstitutional the EU? That's exactly what we lack in the land of liberty - a constitution. But, I'm straying from my topic now, what else do I know is in store for us this year ?

If one steeple is the Daily Mail, then the other is the chorus of fruitcake conservative Middle Englanders chirping away manically on the BBC bulletin boards, that their country has been stolen from them by guess who....yes the EU, and they want it back NOW. There can't be a lower case font on the PCs or laptops these people use, everything is screaming upper case. There's no other caste of people as hard done by or as victimised as they claim to be. Rest up, people, there are other ways to make a point.

Just as the Sun rises in the East and settles later the same day in the West, then so to will the two events I've described appear. And that's how I can bear out my claim of the first paragraph. Some things never change.