2009: A Year For a Change in Direction?

'We may soon be in an age where bartering and trading posts will replace currency'

Welcome to 2009. Broken windows. Graffiti. A sinister wind rattling past the boarded shopfronts. Children eating sloppy handfuls of scraps from the bottom of dustbins in order to survive. No money. No food. No Woolworths.

The country could do what every problem is solved by nowadays: turning itself off and then turning back on again.

They say that cutting back is the only way we're going to be surviving 2009. Maybe a small amount of cannibalism. But cutting back is prominent.

But, it would seem that 2009 is actually set to be a good year. Why? Not because everyone's going to lose their jobs and have to eat their fingers and toes to stay alive, but because - with something collective to worry about - there should be less emphasis on the silly little things that don't matter quite as much.

Realising that their houses are worth about as much as a few grains of sugar and setting them alight to stay warm; people will probably start forgetting about whether the bananas they buy are organic, carbon-neutral, nuclear-free, and personally blessed by Jamie Oliver in a pesticide-liberated wind farm just north of Rio De Janeiro.

After all, during the great depression of the early 1900s and two World Wars, there were no loonies chaining themselves to a fence demanding we save the whales and polar bears, and prevent new roads from being built in case vehicles crush any slugs or ants.

We can only hope that being united by universal financial demise will mean there will be less time and money spent on the unimportant.

In 2008, while the banks collapsed, everyone's money went up in smoke and the government were in their bunkers creating a 10-week crash course on how to change a light bulb safely; everyone let them get away with it because they were too distracted by Madonna's divorce or which coloured bin they needed to put their plastic bottles in.

And the environmental protesters seemed more bothered about the greenhouse gas emissions coming from the back of an Army tank as opposed to the high-explosive tank rounds at the front killing women and children in collateral damage.

Therefore, in 2009, with everyone frying their goldfish for extra protein and shopkeepers offering to massage your feet if they thought there was even half a chance of you buying a Twix, there should be no news of any composting of potato peelings or a celebrity's nose or breast dropping off.

We may soon be in an age where bartering and trading posts will replace currency.

So, can we expect a year when government efforts and money are directed in the way of something useful?

No.

It seems, this year, that Britain's last morsel of common sense has joined Woolworths, Eldorado and Spangles as things of the past.

Enter Change4Life: the government's £75million initiative that's going to turn Britain in to a slim, healthy nation. The new adverts say "Move! Live!"

Supposedly, the adverts in 2010 are going to suggest that we "Blink!" and "Breath!" - just in case the public, with hydrogenated blubber exploding their brain cells, may forget to do anything for themselves.

Because, of course, they think the public, without their intervention, are going to die with a tripplebypassburger and fries hanging out their mouth while reading the Daily Star.

That's probably why the new initiative's has a "4" instead of "four" - because they think the dense public that they govern are having trouble with words.

Or, it may be so fat kidz on da street will understand it and start dodging bullets while jogging in the local park instead of playing on PlayStations.