So here we go again. Light a fire-cracker! We’re into another New Year. Though why we insist on calling this period the start of a year I’m not sure. After all, nothing’s really ‘started’, has it? One day follows the next and the next and the next and so on for ever and ever – so each and every day is, realistically, the start of a new year. If you want to look at it that way. But I guess you’ve got to have some sort of general rule about when a year starts and when an old one ends. Else there’d be mayhem around the globe. Of which there is plenty anyway, though that sort of mayhem has not so much to do with when a year starts or ends as with the wholesale mess which we, as a species, seem intent on making of this extraordinary, beautiful world we inhabit. I…