Thoughts on the Year's End

I'm writing this is the dying minutes of 2012. Countries to the East of the U.K. have already welcomed in the New Year, but here there is lttle more than fifteen minutes to go.
For me, it has been seemed like a year of incident - eventful, that is, without an overriding sense of things moving either forward or back.We are far enough into the new century perhaps for it to have reached a point where it distinctive character to have started to form.