A very good year, or was it?

When I look back and ask my­self if it has been a good year or not, I don't know what to think. The only thing I'm sure of when I think back over the past 12 months is how quickly it went. But that prob­a­bly has more to do with age than any­thing else, and re­view­ing some of the key events that took place in Cat­alo­nia and around the world in 2016, I find my­self split down the mid­dle. Who knows, per­haps that's the way it should be –life is a roller coaster of ups and downs– and per­haps the most im­por­tant thing is not com­ing to any firm con­clu­sion but just tak­ing time to re­flect on the ground we have crossed be­fore set­ting out on the next stage of our ex­is­ten­tial jour­ney.

This is where our an­nual re­view of the year can come in use­ful. In every De­cem­ber issue, Cat­alo­nia Today in­cludes a month-by-month sum­mary of some of the main events that hap­pened at home and abroad. Ob­vi­ously it is a lim­ited and sub­jec­tive se­lec­tion, but it's a good start­ing point for that es­sen­tial pause for re­flec­tion be­tween one year and the next, as well as being just fun to look back and re­fresh the mem­ory. If you haven't al­ready done so, go back and check out the re­view be­tween pages 17 and 41 and let us jog your mem­ory.

As for my own re­flec­tions on the year that is now com­ing to an end, I was struck by two thoughts. The first was that look­ing at re­cent events I find it in­creas­ingly dif­fi­cult to see them in a typ­i­cally bipo­lar way. Let's take Trump win­ning the US pres­i­dency as an ex­am­ple. Was that a good or a bad thing? A decade ago I would have had an in­stant an­swer, but now I'm not so sure. Clearly the new Amer­i­can pres­i­dent is an ap­palling ego­tist with a mav­er­ick na­ture and to­tally un­suited for the key post he will take up in Jan­u­ary. Yet, he is also less likely to start a Third World War than a Hillary Clin­ton, who has a record of war-mon­ger­ing and who seemed hell­bent on pur­su­ing an ag­gres­sive pol­icy in Syria –has she seen who the Syr­ian regime's main ally is? It's just an ex­am­ple, but it shows how hard it is to call it one way or the other.

The other thought was that 12 months is not long enough to know if an event is good or bad. Time will tell. The year began with Car­les Puigde­mont be­com­ing pres­i­dent of Cat­alo­nia, and the process got a fig­ure every­one in the move­ment could stom­ach to act as the tip of the spear for see­ing the process through. Yet, the sov­er­eignty bid is not a 12-month process and, well, only time will tell.

Things are more nu­anced than they seem, or I don't know how to make up my mind.