At this time of year it is practically obligatory to look back on the year which has just finished and ponder on it a bit.

Events

2007 was the year that saw the country get a new Prime Minister and Labour party get a new leader, without a chance to vote on it, and a new deputy leader, with an exhaustive election. The French had their elections with Sarkozy beating Ségolène Royal, and the UK was teased by the prospect of an election we neither wanted nor needed.

Otherwise the news was full of the McCanns, the ‘canoe man’, TV phone-in scandals, Northern Rock and floods.   There were some car bombs which did not explode in London and an attack on Glasgow airport.

Television

I am trying to make more of an effort to watch television, but far too often I can’t find anything I want to watch.  This year there were a few programmes I did make a point of not missing.

At the start of the year there was the ten-year update on This Life which was a bit disappointing but had to be watched.  My Name Is Earl just got better in its second series, as did the IT Crowd.

It was in the vaguely science fiction area that TV was really good in 2007.  There was Primeval, harmless and lightweight, but very watchable, and Jeckyll, a brilliantly-acted update on the  Jeckyll & Hyde story.  The second series of Life on Mars ended with a bang, and then the star turned up as the Master on Doctor Who – which goes from strength to strength and featured the episode Blink which is surely one of the best ever, then ended up with the Master and returned for Christmas with Kylie on the Titanic.

One show above all others kept us returning for more: Heroes.  Wednesday nights are not the same without it.

Sport

Wembley Stadium opened and the first cup final there was as bad as the the last one at Cardiff was good.  West Ham narrowly avoided relegation on the last day of the season and then lost Tevez to Man Utd. but picked up lots of other exciting players who are all injured now.

Crawley Town got points deducted for the third season in a row, but are doing OK in spite of that – but not as well as Leeds who had 15 points deducted and are still challenging for the League 1 title, winning their first 7 games and going 14 games before losing one.

The biggest football event was, of course, England not qualifying for Euro 2008 and Maclaren getting a well-deserved boot.

2007 was also the year when Formula 1 actually got interesting, with a new young Brit coming within a whisker of winning in his first season.

Music

I enjoyed new albums from Manu Chao, Tinariwen, Arctic Monkeys, Gogol Bordello, Paul McCartney and the re-formed Crowded House as well as a new album from Bjork which was a return to accessibility for her.  Mika was everywhere at the beginning of the year but has slipped out of view since then.

2007 was a year for re-forming.  Led Zeppelin played their one-off show in London, the Police, Genesis and the Spice Girls toured and Crowded House did it properly by touring and releasing a new album.

The concert of the year for me was Manu Chao in Brixton, but then it was the only one I went to all year.   Robin Denselow in the Guardian has been missing no opportunity to slag off Chao because of his supposed new direction, but really its just a return to his old direction from his Mano Negra days.

The year saw a trend for by-passing the traditional distribution channels for music.  Radiohead ‘sold’ their new album on an honour system and Prince made me actually buy a Mail on Sunday when he gave his new album away with it.

Lots of exciting things happened in music, but the charts were still dominated by shite from reality show winners and losers.

Technology

The big products of the year were Windows Vista, the iPhone and the Wii, none of which really appeal to me.  Meanwhile Web 2.0 continued to develop, aided by the increasing penetration of broadband access.  Facebook became this year’s MySpace and the question now is whether anything else will become 2008’s Facebook.

Life

This was quite an eventful year from a personal perspective.  For a start I finally got my clearance to transfer at work and stopped commuting to London.  In my last month up there I binged on lunchtime visits to art galleries and walks around and celebrated the move by going to see the Valzquez exhibition at the National Gallery.

The new job proved to be as challenging as the old was boring.  There are some similarities though -  I am already on my third boss there. The two hours a day I spend not commuting by train have really improved life though.

Towards the end of the year I got another new job – prospective parliamentary candidate. How did that happen?  Not much has happened with that yet, but now I have been confirmed by the NEC we are ready to start proper campaigning in 2008.

The family holiday was a bit of a wash-out. Literally.  In the middle of one of the wettest summers we went camping on the edge of a cliff on the Isle of Wight, but the memories of the storms, the mud and the shattered tent poles have subsided now.  We did actually get overseas this year as well, although as it was a day trip to Calais by the Channel Tunnel it was really underseas.
In the summer we became grandparents, with the arrival of Alfie, Charlie turned 16, Frankie turned 18, and Jayne reached 40.  So we were all feeling a bit older when my father died and I started thinking about age in different terms – counting down rather than up.

Other notable departures were Michaelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Lucky Dube, Alan Coren and Benazir Bhutto.

2008

Looking forward, I don’t know what to expect.  With my new perspective on life I intend to do more and to enjoy it more while I can, but first of all there are all those Christmas present DVD box sets to get through…

I would like to take a family holiday abroad for the first time in five years.  With the kids getting older it might be the last family holiday. I would also like to get to see more concerts in 2008.

Politically I am looking forward to being active in Horsham more than in Crawley and in the wider picture I am hoping 2008 is a lot less eventful than 2007.