Each New Year arrives full of promise, and each is steadily dismantled by human folly. History suggests 2026 will be no exception.

Looking for a replacement for your used old year? Something with low mileage and in perfect condition? Want a good trade-in price? A new model with over 11 months rego? And all the wanted extras?

Here, right off the assembly line, fresh from the manufacturer, no previous owner…(drum roll)…2026!!

Or 5786 if you’re Jewish.

2026, so full of promise. So fraught with danger. Ready to be wrecked by nuclear weapons, or climate change, or Netenyahu, or Putin, or Trump, or Artificial Intelligence …or all of the above.

Looking back to Year Dot the pattern is painfully, pathetically clear. This pristine, perfect 12 months will be damaged, debauched and ultimately destroyed by its human inhabitants. We do it every damned time.

No sooner have the final fireworks fizzled out and the last strains of the dirge-like Auld Lang Syne died away than we start swinging the wrecker’s ball.

And I speak with some experience – as 2026 will be my 87th year.

I’ve known every New Year since 1939 – along with a variety of fellow 39’ers including John Cleese, John Howard, Michel Kirby, Clive James, Germaine Greer, Ian McKellen, Francis Ford Coppola, Tina Turner, Harvey Keitel, Ralph Laurent, Gerry Harvey and Lee Harvey Oswald

And despite any differences I reckon we’d all agree that we’ve blown it. Or them – all those neatly packaged lots of 365 days. Talk about carelessness or ingratitude.

So much could have been achieved but humans, forever their own worst enemies, but we insist on our Gazas and Ukraines, on our Donald Trumps. And again and again and again our phoenix nose-dives into its ashes. Clearly the world would be a safer place without us.

And soon may be.

Pick a year. Any year you like at random. Say 1945, my sixth. Like all my contemporaries listed above. On the good side? The surrender of Nazi Germany and the Japanese, the liberation of the concentration camps, and the creation of the United Nations.

On the bad side – Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the deaths of Frankin D Roosevelt and John Curtin …and the beginning of the Cold War.

Doesn’t matter where you stick the pin – what year you choose – you’ll draw blood. It’s what we do best. Yet we could have a New Year’s Resolution for 2026 to learn from millennia of past mistakes.

But as we all know from bitter and ancient experience resolutions are made not merely to be broken but beaten to death. We annihilate our noble ambitions.

So let’s face facts. On past performance we’ll finish off 2026 much as we finished off 2025. With a year to take to the scrapyard.

And what’s this 2026 anyway? That paltry number on the world’s speedo? Check the cosmic microwaves and you’ll see what the scientists see…

…that there have been at least 13.8 billion happy-new-years years since the original fireworks display Fred Hoyle mockingly christened ‘the Big Bang.’

So at very least let us drink that cup of kindness an avoid the smaller bangs of the A-bombs that Vladimir is threatening for 2026 – should Donald deny Vlad his own way in the Ukraine. So we can at least last out until the next chorus of Auld Lang Syne (whatever that hell Robbie Burns meant when he wrote the eerie lyrics)….and 2027.