New Year celebrations are a fraud because the midnight hour is pushed forward or back with every time zone. But one thing is certain about this new year — in Crumlin or Kalgoorlie: its uncertainty.

Not since Britain and France faced Hitler's armies, poised for attack in January 1940, has a new year been so governed by threatening unknowns.

But in January, undaunted, Linz in Austria, close to Hitler's birthplace and where they cheered his invading troops in 1938, becomes an EU Capital of Culture.

In Washington, in three weeks, Obama takes over. He has promised health care for every American, better public services, a green energy policy for the world's most voracious fossil fuel consumer; but he is faced with closed-down motor plants, unemployment touching 7%, a tottering economy and a huge budget deficit. The world will possibly expect too much. Popular disillusion will be his looming danger.

In February, while the World Ski champions execute Bond-style acrobatics on the snow of Val d'Isere and over-weight film moguls prepare to hand out Oscars in Hollywood, the cold hand of the crunch will tighten its midwinter grip.

Unemployment figures in Northern Ireland, already beginning to look like the bad old days of the 1970s, will get worse as closing plants cannot be matched by new investments.

Supermarkets in border towns will continue to enjoy the influx of shoppers from the Republic, which has foolishly allowed itself to become the fourth dearest place to shop worldwide.

More plants will close as foreign investors, mainly American, head for home. Dublin, unable to slash interest rates or boost exports to the UK by devaluing themselves out of trouble, will ponder the price of having their euro.

By March, when we used to hang on the words of a Chancellor disclosing his Budget, further financial histrionics will not matter. The Government is already in hock to the eyebrows. What is a billion here or there?

But toddlers in play pens will pay for it. So will we.

Economists will hold to their warning that house prices have a further 15% to fall to March 2010. Interest charges may fall below 3%.

But savers with small nest eggs will feel hard done by. So will Francophones planning trips on cheapie flights to the hidey-hole in the Dordogne, for the weak pound is here to stay for now.

In April crime-racked South Africa will bid to recover from ex-President Mbeki's collaboration with the tyrant in Zimbabwe by electing a new president.

He will probably be Jacob Zuma, head of the African National Congress. Most will hope for a tightening of the screws on Mugabe. In May India, still rocking from the terrorist menace, will go to the polls and Europe's best footballers will contest the UEFA final in Rome.

In June the moment of truth for the EU could arrive with the five-yearly elections to the European Parliament.

Rebel Europeans are outraged at the undercover strategy devised by Brussels to smuggle through further erosion of national sovereignty, disguised as the Lisbon Treaty, alleged to be a mere tidying-up measure to increase efficiency. They will attempt to turn the elections into a referendum upon it.

Apathetic European voters, whose turn-out has slumped from 63%, in the first elections in 1979, to a little over 45% in 2004, may look the other way, except in the Republic, where Lisbon — rejected in a referendum earlier this year — is a hot issue.

In July, Sweden takes over the EU presidency from the Czechs and the men in tight lycra gather in the squeaky-clean streets of crime-free Monaco for the Tour de France.

In August everyone who is sure they matter goes on holiday, being jostled in sweaty airports for their pains.

In September NASA launches a robot science lab at Mars on a journey expected to last a year. There will be an orgy of reprise tied to the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War.

In October bankers of the IMF and the World Bank meet in Istanbul to discuss recent sins of the profession. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences meets in Stockholm to award the munificent prizes financed from the £1.75m Alfred Nobel, the guilt-ridden dynamite king, left when he died in 1896.

In November 53 Commonwealth heads of state will all gather together in Trinidad for their biennial meeting in the presence of the Queen.

But the Irish, with much to contribute but still the prisoners of their past, will not be there. Berliners will celebrate 20 years without the wall.

In December, its doggedness unimpaired in face of American protests, the EU will make its third bid to ban all imports not labelled in grams and kilos.