It’s only fair that I should get one too. Everyone else is writing them. After all, what better way is there to see in the New Year than with a dramatic, despairing, defeatist headline?

Yet another master class in the art of news delivery came this morning over my breakfast date with the day’s selection of nationals. The cutthroat sounds of ‘decline’, ‘debt pile’ and ‘disaster’ leapt bellicosely off the page. Disaster? Oh, heavens. I picked up another: ‘Jobs cut’, ‘deep concern’, ‘heading for collapse’. Collapse? Good Lord. It really is a wonder anyone reads newspapers these days.

Not even a month into the New Year and the British media have painted us a picture of a world in tatters. Not a detail has been spared in their fabrication of this elaborate mural of misfortune. Each new forecast adds a stroke of pessimism to our day, each negative angle, a melancholic embellishment to our already low expectations for 2012. Yes, a Happy New Year to you too.

And people seem increasingly negative? Well you try cracking a smile after shoveling that spoonful of joviality down with your morning cup of caffeine.

Yet, if only my reaction to such tales of economic hardship, social disparity and political turmoil had not felt so feigned. Truth is, we have all come to expect, and perhaps even on some level demand exactly this kind of hyperbolic hysteria from the media.

Maybe they’re on to something; if we’re going down, we might as well do it in style. However, it does seem as if the media are playing up to the cult of dramatic expectation which has resulted in an overwhelming sense of fatalism in British society.

We moan about a world run by imbeciles; we attack the crumbling coalition and their labour-iously dull opposition. We wallow in adversity. We forecast failure at every turn. The year’s just kicking off, and what’s the topic on everyone’s lips? Eschatology. Apocalyptism. The end of the world. How very cheery.

The Doomsday clock has inched closer to midnight and many are counting down the days to Armageddon, preparing their goodbyes to the tune of a laughable misinterpretation of the ancient Mayan Calendar. I was even confronted yesterday with a radio feature about the ultimate ‘bucket list’ of the top things to do before you die.

And whilst we may not all be striking off the days until ‘The End’, (21st December, in case you’re wondering) we can hardly claim to have got the year off to the brightest of starts.

I am by no means suggesting that everything is right as rain. It’s not. Merely, that hard times do not equate to the end of the world, nor do they excuse an attitude of overwhelming defeatism. These poor listeners must know that there’s still time to attempt to sing that duet with Chris Martin, or to graffiti their name on the Great Wall of China.

We all know drama sells papers. However, when this heightened journalistic tone can no longer distinguish between the severity of a horticultural quandary (the current ‘mildew crisis’- protect your busy lizzies!) and a report, for example on poverty and death following the aid disaster in the Horn of Africa, we know we have a problem. It’s high time the media took a step back and allowed us to gain the perspective we need to face a tough new year with the right attitude.

Easy, perhaps, for me to say from the safety of our ivory-encrusted Cambridge tower. Yet there is nothing quixotic about my predictions for 2012; even I at times misplace my rose-tinted spectacles. It’s just that there is something truly intolerable about a negative beginning. No matter how bleak a forecast may seem, it’s a tradition, in fact, a downright obligation to throw ourselves into a new year with optimism and resolution (we don’t make them for nothing, you know).

Instead of facing up to the challenges of the new year, Britain appears to have preoccupied itself with an array of excuses and cop-out coping mechanisms in reaction to recession and social frustration. We have found solace in the comforting shelters of nostalgia: even in the arts the world of film has sealed its lips with new release ‘The Artist’, Vogue Britain heralds the “Gatsby glamour” of the twenties and in sport, football hoolig- I mean fans are celebrating the celestial return to the pitch of former icons, Henry and Scholes.  But, alas, as great as these things are, the same cannot be said for the social stagnation caused by excessively negative coverage of political and economic affairs. It is time to take a step forward and make those resolutions for 2012.

When considering our own approach to beginnings, we must therefore ignore the pessimism-drenched pages of the daily press. Instead, let us seek a muse in the glorious world of fiction and follow the example of the novelist. Setting out from their very first line with a story in mind; they know there will be drama, but they don’t give the game away (the paradox and contradiction present in the opening lines of Dickens’ ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ provide an excellent example). They also know that even the most dire situations will inevitably come to some sort of resolution, which will take the form, more often than not, of something a bit less drastic than the Apocalypse.

These writers teach us to expect, to predict, but to resist fixed expectations- an attitude from which we could perhaps learn a thing or two. I know it’s only fiction but even in real life, things tend to have a habit of working themselves out.

Yes. The world has plenty of reasons to be miserable, but this sadistic affixation with doom and gloom will get us nowhere. We may not all be daft enough to believe that we’re actually on the way out, but heck, let’s try and live 2012 like it’s our last. I wish you a Happy New Year. To Beginnings!