Assessment

It is easy to get things out of proportion. You need to halt sometimes and ask yourself - Is it just me? 

I look back over this year and  see a troubled and troubling world out there. Human society has never been perfect but 2016 appears to have taken us several steps closer to the abyss. It's worrying, very worrying. Of course there's Trump and there's Britain's narrow decision to leave the European Union. And there's the unholy mess that Syria has become. We are all aware of these things. We have been bombarded with images and endless words, over and over. It would be almost impossible to ignore it all.

Then there's been lots of other worrying stuff. Mad men driving lorries into crowds of innocent people. Sexual abusers being unmasked week after week. Desperate migrants drowning at sea. Social media trolls inventing false news stories which thousands believe. I could go on and on, moving from world events to the microcosmic details of everyday life.

In Sheffield, council sub-contractors have chopped down dozens of perfectly healthy mature trees, replacing them with scrawny saplings that will take several decades to catch up. Other contractors have been merrily removing traditional green man lighting from pedestrian crossings, replacing it with console screens mounted at waist level above the "Stop" request button.

Train tickets cost the earth. "Smart" motorways have no hard shoulders. Where once we got our energy from British Gas and the local electricity board, now there's a plethora of energy companies competing for our "custom". In America, an estimated 14,000 people will have been shot to death this year - a total that does not include suicide deaths. Big businesses and millionaires bend taxation rules to breaking point. In East Africa, lives continue to be ravaged by AIDS.

And when it comes to the natural world with which we have all been blessed, the carcasses of elephants and rhinos lie rotting in the heat, victims of poachers as starving polar bears  drift away on ice floes. In Russia and Malta, so-called sportsmen shoot down endangered birds just for the thrill of it all. And in  the Amazon basin, swathes of rainforest are obliterated - often containing forms of life that human beings have never recorded - extinct even before we have even seen them.

I know other people who feel the same as me about 2016. A bad, bad year in which the world went rather crazy and many past certainties were shaken to the floor. Are we wrong? Is it just us? Is there any reason why we should look ahead to 2017 with optimism, believing that a corner has been turned and that the year ahead will be better than the one that is about to end?