2012: The Omnishambolic Clusterfuck Of Bad-news-mageddon

So farewell then 2012.

It was -- yet again (and rather disappointingly it must be said) -- the year when the world didn't end.  As doomsday scenarios go, the Mayan calendar couldn't match the Millennium Bug for sheer hysteria but it still had that 'trap 6' kind of likely long-shot feel about it; like it could come up the inside track and blindside us all with a virtuoso display in apocalypse. But sadly for the Mayan Cassandras, it was not to be. Never mind, it's not the end of the....

No doubt about it, 2012 sucked balls and that's the official verdict from up here in the penurious garret (I'm not kidding) of Croppy Towers. From January on, it was bad-news-mageddon right from the get-go. Iran, Syria, Palestine, it all had a familiar kind of ring to it; another year of grim role calls.

The world economy continued to drag along the bottom with the Greeks spending another year in the ante-room of currency exit while the right and left in the country started squaring off. In the UK, Gideon Osborne's early budget and pasty-gate prompted unhelpful comparisons with 'The Thick Of It' and the wonderful neologism 'omnishambles'.

And while we thought we could just about handle 'dragging along the bottom', we now have the excitement of teetering on the precipice of a Marianas Trench of global economic meltdown known as the US fiscal cliff. No doubt about it, the second-term honeymoon of POTUS Obama was as brief as a butterfly's fart.

 2012 was the year that the euro didn't implode (again), much to the  chagrin of doom-saying Daily Mail and Telegraph leader writers. In fact, to their utter apoplexy, the EU not only managed to nurse the ailing euro through the year (mostly by fiscally fist-fucking everyone in Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece) it goes and wins the Nobel Peace Prize as well.

The Rusty Wire Service finds itself in a bit of a quandary regarding the euro and the whole European project.  Now, we're not tearing ourselves up about it like some conservative and unionist parties we know but the Croppy does nevertheless find himself increasingly tending more towards a more sceptical stance when it comes to the single currency as the damage to large swathes of European society is assessed.

In the current spiral of debt and shame, the currency has depreciated nicely; this is good news for exporting countries and of course who's the big exporter? It's our old friends the Ethel Mermans. And who is the so-called PIGS biggest creditor? The self-same Ethels; so while Germans save and export at a rate of knots, the poorer half of the EU is repaying German lenders at a higher rate of interest and fuelling what has been something of a (Insert Germanic portmanteau word alert here) Perfecktewirtschaftsturm (perfect economic storm).

It was the year the Leveson Inquiry produced nothing more remarkable than an uninspired cut and paste of current thought on press regulation. I'm personally with the editor of Private Eye on this one: there's no need for more laws regulating the relationship between the estates of parliament, the executive, the police and the press; what's needed is the will and cojones (paraphrasing of course) to implement the perfectly good laws on the statute books which are supposed to regulate the culture and behaviour of these estates which gave rise to the inquiry in the first place.

And let's not forget 'the Wee Pravince' of Norn Iron which has seen its fair share of historic moments down the years. This year's 'hand of history' moment went to the 'English Queen' shaking hands with Martin McGuinness in one of the more unlikely photo-ops of 2012. But then, with one half of the most improbable double act of political history currently on the lookout for a new partner since the retirement of the other 'Chuckle Brother' Ian Paisley,  it shouldn't come as any surprise that McGuinness seems to be using what appears to be an old 1970s IRA hit-list as his audition roster.... Here's what we thought at the time.

The Rusty Wire Service would like to take this opportunity to wish its readers (if such there be) a Happy Hogmanay, Capo d'ano and Silvester. On a personal note, apologies are in order for a poor service in the second half of the year.

This has been down to circumstances which gave the Croppy to wonder at times whether his 2012 had actually been scripted by the bitchy screenwriters of an overheated Mexican soap opera who'd just discovered the meaning of (Insert Germanic portmanteau word alert here) 'schadenfreude'.  We still expect the appearance of a long-lost transvestite half-brother with psychic powers to turn up at my door on New Year's Eve...

Here's hoping for a lucky '13.