Looking Ahead to 2026.

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Looking back at 2025, I’m struck by how the year behaved like a neighbour who keeps promising they’ll “pop round and fix that fence” and instead spends twelve months leaning over it, offering opinions nobody asked for. It wasn’t a bad year, exactly  just a relentlessly peculiar one. A year that arrived with a clipboard, took notes on our hopes, and then wandered off to do something entirely different.

We lurched from one national distraction to another: political announcements that sounded like they’d been drafted on the back of a napkin; public debates that flared up, fizzled out, and left everyone slightly more confused than before; weather that couldn’t decide whether it was staging a protest or a performance piece. And through it all, Britain did what Britain always does complained, queued, carried on, and insisted everything was “fine” in a tone that suggested it absolutely wasn’t.

But there were moments small, stubborn ones where the country remembered itself. A shared joke in a supermarket queue. A stranger holding a door. A community event that actually worked. A sense, however fleeting, that we’re all muddling through the same daft circus.

If 2025 taught us anything, it’s that life rarely behaves, governments rarely deliver, and plans rarely unfold the way they’re supposed to. But people ordinary, unremarkable, quietly heroic people still find ways to make the whole thing bearable. A cup of tea. A raised eyebrow. A muttered “you couldn’t make it up.”

And maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s the whole trick: surviving the nonsense with a bit of dignity, a bit of humour, and the occasional biscuit.

So here’s to 2026 may it be slightly less ridiculous than the year before, and generous enough to give us a few pleasant surprises. Not miracles. Not revolutions. Just small mercies: trains that turn up, bills that don’t induce palpitations, politicians who can get through a sentence without causing national embarrassment.

May the weather behave, the news calm down, and the country rediscover the ability to laugh without wincing. May friendships deepen, families stay mostly sane, and strangers be kinder than expected.

And may you, dear reader, find pockets of joy in unexpected places a good conversation, a quiet morning, a moment where the world feels briefly, beautifully manageable.

Happy 2026. Let’s meet it with a raised glass, a raised eyebrow, and the faint but stubborn hope that this might just be our year. Jim x

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