When the bonds that hold us together are tested, the cost is often borne in the very divisions we seek to overcome.

I recently watched a film called United, based on the true and tragic story of the Manchester United team lost in the Munich air disaster of 1958. It is a story many people think they know - young men, enormous promise, sudden catastrophe -  but what struck me was not the crash itself. It was what followed.

In the aftermath of tragedy, Manchester United rebuilt not through optimism, but through unity of purpose. Today, in a world where everything has become political and division is quietly encouraged, that lesson feels more confronting than ever. This New Year, the question is not whether we agree -  but whether we are still willing to stand together.

Those who survived did not rebuild because they were cheerful, or optimistic, or untouched by grief. They rebuilt because they understood something that seems almost foreign to us now: that when loss comes -  and it always does - the only way forward is together.

That is what makes the film so confronting today.

Because we are not united.

Leonard Cohen once said, “I’ve seen the future, brother: it is murder.”

For a long time, we treated that as poetry. Or atmosphere. Or a warning meant for some other century.

But Cohen was never vague about the future. He didn’t predict gadgets or machines. He predicted the erosion of the soul. He was writing about what happens when efficiency outruns wisdom, when intimacy is replaced by management, when systems become more important than people.

What we are building now would not have surprised him. AI.

Artificial intelligence did not arrive as a conqueror. It arrived as a helper. It learned our language, anticipated our needs, smoothed friction, saved time. It offered answers before we had finished asking the question.

That is how power has always entered the room.

When I was a young girl, I wanted to be beautiful.
Clever. Successful. Happy.

As the years slip by like whispers in the wind, I find myself reflecting on the dreams that shaped my youth -  and on the stark contrast between that world and the one we inhabit today.

In an age dominated by illusion and manufactured identity, it feels worth pausing to remember what it once meant to aspire to genuine beauty, strength, and authenticity -  before the line between real and fake blurred beyond recognition.

I wanted to be pretty. As wonderful as my mother. To marry a man as great as my father. To meet a boy as strong as my older brothers.

And I can’t help wondering what children are encouraged to aspire to now, in an age of confusion, gender politics, and exaggerated, artificial bodies -  where self-worth is measured in filters and slogans rather than substance.

By Our Special Correspondent (and Occasional Hero), Roderick (Whiskers) McNibble
(Filed from the front row, with a chewed pencil and a notebook sticky with jubilation)

Dusty Gulch had reached peak anger.

The Dusty Dingo bar was a warzone of paperwork, feathers, and spilled beer. Chairs flipped, barstools stacked like barricades, and someone wielded a clipboard as a makeshift sword. Prentis Penjani flapped like a bureaucratic galah, Maurice E-Duck stomped forms with minor-earthquake force, and Lord Squawk Squawk screeched from the official screen:

“THIS TOWN HAS FAILED THE SNAKE!”

It appears that snakes have been rampaging through Dusty Gulch and Prentis Penjani has declared that any mention of snakes being mean is hate speech. That snakes are really nice and only one bites a resident every now and again, but that does not make all snakes naughty. 

The snake was smug and snug in Moonlight Manor, coiled with all the satisfaction of someone who knows paperwork is on its side. All food paid for, all accommodation "on the house," and King Farty Fingers and Prentis Penjani were on their knees kissing its tail.