Nine reasons to be cheerful this year

Since it’s the first week of the New Year I’m going to pretend the bad stuff isn’t happening and focus on the lovely, life–affirming things I learned (or relearned) last year. Here are some of them.
 
1. There is hope for the youth. Yes, I know we think they’re all grisly little Marxist snowflakes who are going to vote in Jeremy Corbyn, but this is largely a product of brainwashing and poor governance, rather than fundamental malignity. In fact, some of the kids I encountered last year have given me great hope: check out, for example, the two teenagers I interviewed for my podcast, Sebastian Shemirani and Steven Edginton. Bright, hard-working, big-hearted and able to absorb and process vast quantities of information at gobsmacking speeds, the kids are all right. They just need red-pilling.
 
2. The pun is mightier than the sword. Actually I hate that pun. In fact I hate puns generally. But my point stands: if you really want to kill Nazis, as the painfully earnest and increasingly aggressive left is always claiming it wants to do, the deadliest method is wit, humour and snark, not violence. This is why I know that however bad things get politically, those of us who believe in stuff such as liberty, free markets and limited government will inevitably prevail over those who don’t. We’re nicer, we’re funnier — and the left can’t do memes.
 
3. Build your mental poetry library. Two years ago, I learned about 12 poems by heart and they’re still there, intact, waiting to be filleted for judicious quotes or muttered under my breath while I go on my morning jog. This time, I vaingloriously opted for just one — ‘Burnt Norton’, the first of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets — and because it’s long and abstruse and mostly doesn’t rhyme or scan, it has taken me the whole year.