WHAT WILL BE, WILL BE

What did we think of 2022? It had its highs, like the World Cup, and its lows, like the war in Ukraine, but in gen­eral I wasn’t im­pressed and I’m more than happy to move on. Is 2023 going to be any bet­ter, though? In­evitably it too will have its highs and lows, but what they might be is any­one’s guess. I de­cided to have a go at the guess­ing game and spent some 10 min­utes try­ing to imag­ine what might hap­pen over the next 12 months. The only thing I could think of with any cer­tainty is that my foot­ball team, Ever­ton, will again be in­volved in a rel­e­ga­tion bat­tle. It’s at times like this that you have to re­sort to the ex­perts (i.e. the In­ter­net), so I went on­line to see what those sup­pos­edly in the know are say­ing will hap­pen in the year ahead.

The Covid-19 pan­demic will end. Thank you. My col­umn last month was ask­ing just that ques­tion and the fu­tur­ist con­sult­ing firm Quan­tum­run has kindly pro­vided an an­swer. They also say that the Eu­ro­pean Space Agency will launch the Hera Mis­sion, which is a sys­tem de­signed to de­tect threat­en­ing as­ter­oids weeks be­fore they get near Earth. Not hav­ing life on your planet snuffed out by a way­ward ce­les­tial body has to be good news if you ask me.

It’s not all good news, though. The ’ex­perts’ at the Fi­nan­cial Times pre­dict that the war in Ukraine will con­tinue, as nei­ther side is in a po­si­tion that it wants to con­sol­i­date. I must say that it’s not much of a sur­prise, as the lack of any sort of peace process at all sort of gives it away. The doom and gloom mer­chants at the FT also pre­dict black­outs around Eu­rope as gas re­serves are used up, Russ­ian gas ex­ports de­crease, and al­ter­na­tive en­ergy sources are un­able to make up the short­fall. Mind you, the FT is con­fi­dent that China will not in­vade Tai­wan, which is good news, es­pe­cially if you’re Tai­wanese.

LinkedIn also has pre­dic­tions, in­clud­ing the cu­ri­ous fore­cast that the menopause will be­come big busi­ness in 2023. It ap­pears that the global pop­u­la­tion of menopausal women is pro­jected to grow to 1.2 bil­lion by 2030, which is an un­tapped mar­ket right there. If you’ve been think­ing about start­ing a busi­ness pro­vid­ing so­lu­tions to menopausal women, your time has come. LinkedIn also pre­dicts we’ll start wear­ing sea­weed, as the sus­tain­able fash­ion busi­ness con­sol­i­dates and de­sign­ers look to up their green cre­den­tials (check out the re­port on sus­tain­able fash­ion we did in the No­vem­ber issue).

As for in­ter­na­tional broad­caster CNN, in a hard-hit­ting piece of jour­nal­ism it pre­dicts that Be­y­oncé’s “Re­nais­sance” will win the Grammy album of the year in 2023. How about that? CNN also thinks that Ukraine’s pres­i­dent, Volodymyr Ze­len­sky, will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. To be fair, I see that hap­pen­ing. At the be­gin­ning of the war Ze­len­sky tried to start a peace process with the Rus­sians until Boris John­son rushed over there to con­vince him that it would be bet­ter to ac­cept thou­sands of Ukrain­ian ca­su­al­ties, and bil­lions of euros of weapons from the West, and use them to weaken Rus­sia for us, if you don’t mind, that would be great, thank you, here’s the Nobel Peace Prize.

Whether Ever­ton get rel­e­gated or not, I can con­fi­dently pre­dict that the geopo­lit­i­cal movers and shak­ers will be up to their usual shady shenani­gans.

Opin­ion