This is probably the final post of the year.

What has been an occasionally “challenging” year (polite euphemism for the pile of poo emoji).

I heard the above comment at my networking meeting this morning.

And it wasn’t meant in a bad way.

Just too many people act as if the new year will mean they can reset their brain and start again from scratch as if nothing has happened…

If only!

We are each the sum of our total experience and it’s very difficult to ignore what went before.

At the risk of making this post unrecyclable (in both Merriam-Webster and Collins, depending on which side of the Atlantic you, are but not in WordPress’s spellchecker) it’s election day today.

Okay, if this was Italy or Israel it wouldn’t matter much but, despite five year fixed term parliaments, this is our third in a five year period.

I’m not going to mention my political allegiance here, I don’t want to get caught up in the problems at this time, suffice to say it’s a shame there’s not a box stating “None of the Above”…

And I could be deciding where to emigrate to tomorrow.

Why is it okay to lie if you’re a politician?

When Facebook decided that political utterances would NOT be subject to fact checking scrutiny I was frankly appalled.

Why are they exempt?

I could be cynical and say it’s because we assume they’re all lying already, but.

I’m also old enough to remember politicians resigning public office for misleading parliament.

Now it appears it’s just part of the job description!

It’s fascinating – in some strange way – to look at the post-truth world we live in.

Not so good to live in it but can’t have everything.

I may have this wrong but my understanding is – if you don’t like the truth, make up another one that you do like.

Some of us might say “hold on, won’t everyone assume they are lying?” but apparently that doesn’t matter.

If everyone gets to think everything is lies the liars will have won.

Because the truth won’t be believed either.

So is there an absolute thuth (or truth if you’d prefer – fat fingers? maybe not, completely difference part of keyboard)?

And does it matter?

It matters if you’re 16 with potentially another 100+ years to go and climate change is real.

And it matters if you’re an economic refugee and the country you’ve tried to go to doesn’t want to know.

It even matters if you’re a big oil or mining company and someone might expect you to pay to clear the mess up.

And I have to have a sentence not starting with ‘it’ here to keep the SEO happy. Bulging eye emoji.

It matters if you’re female and live in India. I have NO idea how you cope with the potential of being killed by men who think you’re “fair game”.

It matters if you’re Mexican. If you don’t get shot by the US border guards you’re at a substantial risk of getting caught up in gang warfare you are nothing to do with.

It matters to each and every one of us.

And it won’t be the same as other people.

We each have our priorities and they will likely be different to the next person’s.

And so we have to make compromises (I originally started with “but” but decided this is negative in a coaching sense) – I LIKE the idea of a hung parliament.

Lots of people might say MPs quite rightly ought to be hung but I’m not going to go there.

I had seriously high hopes of deep schisms in both the major parties earlier in the year leading to two Labour parties and two Conservative parties.

We could then have had 97 possibilities for different coalition governments and might just have ended up with something that was pretty acceptable to most people.

Instead of which we have a country which around 50% of which will not be happy with the result in the morning.

C’est la vie.

Which I’ve told lots of people is French for “it is the toilet”. Grinning face emoji.

Which reminds me – the recent death of Clive James has robbed the world of a raconteur (French for a person who talks to raccoons?) par excellence.

I’m of that generation that remembers one of his catchphrases on “What the Papers Say” maybe?

“”Hola”, which is Spanish for “Hola”.”

You had to have been there…

My apologies – got a little serious up until then.

Won’t happen again – certainly not until 2020 anyway.

So finally Season’s Greetings and a Happy New Year.

New Year – same old…