Happy New Year!

I hope 2022 proves to be a good one for you, and as I said to a friend who made it through a tough one last year: there are surely better times ahead.

The problem is: nobody knows when.

One of the most difficult things to come to terms with in the Covid era is being unable to look forward to anything, anymore, with any confidence.

This time last year, we were daring to hope that life would be back to some kind of normality by the end of the year.

But when, in September, my wife and I finally got to enjoy our son’s wedding, it was on the fifth date that had been entered in the diary.

It turned out to be the perfect day and we were lucky in the end.

But we still felt robbed of the pleasure of looking forward to it and the excitement of the days and weeks leading up to it.

By the time the big day finally arrived, we had simply given up daring to hope it would actually happen.

And still everything in the diary is written in pencil.

We made the mistake of looking forward to our daughter (who lives and works in London) driving home for Christmas.

She was practically in the car with Chris Rea on the radio when she tested positive for the omicron variant, dashing family Christmas plans for the second year running.

And now our thoughts have turned to a family holiday booked for next month, when I, my wife, my three brothers and their wives will, in theory, spend a week together in the Canary Islands.

We booked it months ago because - having been able to see much less of each other during the pandemic than we planned, even though we all live in Swindon - we all needed something to look forward to.

I am a great believer in the power of anticipation, which is often as good as the actual doing, and that is never truer than when looking forward to getting away on holiday.

But thanks to new variants and confusion and uncertainty over ever-changing travel restrictions, we now have no idea whether we will be able to take our seats on the plane next month or be forced to wait until a vague date in the future.

The pandemic has proved catastrophic for some people, so the last couple of years has taught the rest of us to count our blessings, but the virus has devised countless ways of undermining many of the coping mechanisms we all adopt to see us through the challenges of life.

And while we used to be divided according to whether we considered our glasses were half full or half empty, that hardly matters anymore because the waiter with the bottle for topping them up has gone missing.

But let’s raise a glass to a new year, anyway, and hope it behaves better than the last two.

After all, when expectation has gone, hope is all that’s left.