The Year of the Snake, representing the old, is fast slithering away to make way for the Year of the Horse, symbolising the new.
The Horse is shaping up as a predictable year. Two issues will loom large on the horoscopic horizon: the questions of universal suffrage and universal pensions.
As a freelancing soothsayer, my prognosis for next year is that it will be better than this year. But honestly, it does not take a stargazer to predict this.
For nothing could be worse than this year - best described as a year of omnishambles.
There were the imbroglios of ineffectual policies which hung like the sword of Damocles over important issues such as land for housing and refuse dumps; milk-powder for Hong Kong babies; and kindergarten and school places for Hong Kong kids. Then, there was the Hong Kong Television Network fiasco which was proof enough of the government's unwelcome intervention in the market place.
To top it all, many of the government's policy initiatives were plagued by either an uneasy passage through the Legislative Council or were blocked altogether, so much so that people were beginning to ask whether Hong Kong was governable at all.
With an ever widening wealth gap and a diminishing middle class, the urban poor still live in substandard housing, including dingy holes of partitioned tenements which they call home.
