For the last few years we have met with the same friends on New Year’s Eve. We do the same things as everyone else: we eat, we drink, we laugh and generally have a good time but sometime on New Year’s Eve 2011 someone, I forget who, made a suggestion that has now become a bit of a tradition for us.
It was suggested that we make a set of predictions that we sealed in an envelope to be kept and opened one year later. Amazingly the envelope wasn’t lost over the period of the year and we had a great laugh matching our predictions to what had actually happened over the course of the year. And so a tradition was born.
We did the same again last night. Opened up last year’s predictions and worked out who had got the most right (me!) and then made our predictions for this year. It can be a little morbid as categories include who from public life is going to be no longer with us (I’ve had Margaret Thatcher for the last three years and I was bound to be right eventually but now I’m going to have to find a new bête noire.) and similarly for the next royal to go. However, the list also includes predictions (guesses) for what level the FOOTSIE 100 will be next year and important things like just who will win the Eurovision Song Contest in 2014.
Despite not being short of envelopes we insist on using the same one that we have had for the last three years and simply changing the date. It is also now becoming adorned with quips added by individuals over the years. As an additional “security” measure we this year also put the envelope into a “safe” (see picture below) which can “only” be opened using my phone so I will have to be there to open it. This seems to have added an additional element of fun/danger to the process as so much could well go wrong in the next twelve months – top of list must be that I am highly likely to change my phone!
So now the safe will be tucked away and forgotten about for another year until the envelope is opened over dinner once more and we discover that nobody had Latvia to win the Eurovision or that Hull would win the FA Cup Final. Who’d have thought?
But who is to stop you cracking the safe early Neil. Have Blair bush and Obama not taught you that someone needs to police those in power ?
The safe is held with someone else where I won’t have access it until the appropriate time.