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From the Reverend Richard Coles:

听As temperatures plunge the big freeze brings traffic chaos and misery to millions, said the news report, as I drove uninterrupted and at normal speed from Cornwall to Northamptonshire for Christmas. I say uninterrupted, I stopped at Gloucester Services, me for some of their excellent marmalade, and the dog for a pee, and have to say did not recognise this extinction event they were talking about on the wireless. The dog and I motored with customary brio through the snowy landscape and although it wasn鈥檛 me who was stranded, or skidded on ice, nevertheless I couldn鈥檛 help thinking over-excitable reporting gives a distorted view of events. Not just on the roads. The Boxing Day sales are a little down and the economy crashes into recession; uncertainty about Brexit grounds laden airliners on their stands; a shortage of tenderstem broccoli causes riots in Maidenhead.

听In our dynamic, competitive, gossipy world, news sometimes feels like more like amphetamine than information, leaving us wide-eyed, teeth grinding with anxiety, rather than just better informed. And that is of course exacerbated in an era of social media, when the most transient impulse can be pinged to a million phones before you can say Abraham Lincoln.听

听The human appetite for catastrophe is nothing new. In Christian tradition the arrival of the Apocalypse, promised by the Book of Revelation, has been announced so often, you could live in a state of permanent Code Black if you pick the right sect. The turn of a millennium, each beginning of a new year, transmits again that same pulse of anxiety, I think, for some giving visions of a world crashing in flames, for most an unsteady resolve to walk to the shops more. But just as the gospel writers realised, nearly two thousand years ago, that the followers of Jesus were in for the long haul rather than a quick reboot, perspective comes to us too, the acknowledgement that tomorrow will be more like today than not, and that our best defence against the ruin of goodness is not to tool up with fiery swords, but to take a first step in a better direction. Happy New Year!