I know this might sound awfully negative but, all in all, 2016 is shaping up to be a pretty crap year. Compared to the awesomeness of 2012 (olympics) and 2014 (graduating my MA, watching Monty Python and meeting Patrick Stewart), things seem to have become decidedly bleaker. We are now leaving europe, and the most powerful nation on earth now has a complete nutter for a president. I can’t help reading analysis like this and thinking things for the world in general are about to get far, far bleaker. Parallels with the 1930s seem inescapable. And yet, just as humanity survived that crisis, as well as every crisis before and since, I know we’ll pull through it. As Ned Stark is so fond of saying, ”Winter is coming”. Yet winter is always followed by spring; and however crappy things become – and frankly, that’s looking less and less like hyperbole by the day – I know we’ll pull through it. After all, Star Trek predicts we’ll soon go through a catastrophic third world war before we become the space-faring civilisation we are destined to be. We just need to sit tight, hunker down and wait things out. In all seriousness, things are starting to look rather bleak.