It’s the time of year for being positive; for putting aside the tedious and intractable problems facing humanity and submitting to qualified optimism.

As usual, the Christmas glass-half-full index is topped by medical advance.

There have been astonishing developments in cancer treatment in 2009 which, as usual, we have taken completely for granted.

British scientists have mapped the genetic codes that cause cancers – or rather the degenerate genomes – and may soon be able to devise drugs to tackle them.

It is possible now to say that cancer, which kills one in three people, could beaten in a decade. Incredible.

In 2009 medical researchers in Glasgow University were astonished to discover, when they analysed their data following up the ban on smoking in public places, that there had been a 17% decline in heart attacks in Scotland in the year after the ban was introduced. Now there’s something to cheer about. Sadly the rate of decline in heart disease generally in Scotland is rather less than in some other regions of Europe because of the “Scottish effect”, which probably involves Scots not being cheerful enough.

But even in Scotland we are living longer. Longevity is another blessing of modern civilisation that we perversely regard as a curse.

In 2009 we obsessed about the downside of ageing – the failure of pensions, the cost of medical advances, the poor quality of old peoples’ homes.

But these are all side effects of living longer – the greatest gift there is. Whisper it, but the vast majority of older people live happy and healthy lives and are wealthier than ever before.

In 2009 I think we started watching television properly for the first time ever, thanks to one of the greatest cultural breakthroughs since TV became a mass medium: BBC iplayer. Never again can you say: ‘there’s nothing on the box’.

With digital you can now spend all day watching Life on Earth, In The Thick Of It or Andrew Graham-Dixon’s Art of Russia. With on demand television you can pig out on the Simpsons, the Sopranos, wall to wall West Wings or any number of programmes of high quality. Thanks to HBO and BBC4 and other digital portals, television has never been better; cultural excellence has never been easier to access.

2009 was for many people the year of The Wire, when we all became immersed in the patois of the Baltimore drug corners. Hailed as the greatest television programme of all time, The Wire took the medium to a new level, with a gripping narrative that revealed the fractured relationships between social groups in urban America better than any sociological treatise. The box will never be the same again.

Another astonishing development in 2009 was music downloading. Unable to combat illegal file-sharing, the record companies decided to authorise it on free sites like Spotify, which I discovered almost by accident last year.

I’ve been able to listen to long forgotten progressive rock bands from the 1970s – destroyed by punk – like Caravan, Curved Air, King Crimson – and all for free. And without the humiliation of having to ask for them in a record shop!

What’s even more remarkable is that, even as music became free, people were still determined to pay for it: and sales of singles are actually higher than in the days of vinyl. Rage Against The Machine destroyed the evil Cowell monster in the Christmas charts and the world rejoiced!

I’ve always had mixed feelings about mobile telephony, email, Facebook and all the rest.

Exposure to too much new media can fry your brain, turn you into a twittering narcissist or just destroy your peace of mind.

With a Blackberry, there is nowhere to hide. However, not even a curmudgeon like me can fail to be excited by the dawn of the smart phone in 2009.

Soon we will all be carrying multi-media devices that can not only send texts and email and search the news, but can be used to read books, write articles, translate languages, keep our accounts and even pay for things.

These devices will even monitor our health. Google is well on the way to digitising the whole of the world’s knowledge, as well as our urban geography, which is a creepy thought in one sense, but also offers us a new way of interacting with the world. We will have 360-degree knowledge literally within our grasp thanks to devices which match up satellite navigation with other sources of knowledge and keep us constantly informed. Science fiction never predicted anything as extraordinary as this.

Other reasons to be cheerful as 2009 fades?

Well, we have not fallen into a second Great Depression – something that seemed a distinct possibility only a year ago.

We have the first black President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, who is probably the most gifted leader America has had since Roosevelt.

The end of the Iraq war is in sight, though the people responsible for it are unlikely to be brought to book. Electric cars have finally taken to the road and signalled the imminent death of internal combustion.

We found water on the Moon and in Mars, meaning that life is possible elsewhere in the solar system.

The Large Hadron Collider was fired up meaning that the final secrets of the universe are about to unfold.

And last but not least, in 2009 we celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Scottish parliament – a piece of constitutional innovation that has actually worked.

As a result of self-government, Scotland has changed in all sorts of ways including our attitude to the English. We have mellowed as a nation. Here’s an anecdote to end the year with.

Before Christmas, I took my son Jamie to see the comedian Jimmy Carr perform before a live audience of three thousand mainly working class Scots. Carr is not only intensely English, he’s also unashamedly middle class. But he’s also very funny and likes to push boundaries, so he spent a lot of time winding up the audience about their accents and self-destructive social habits. Think of it: three thousand Scots sitting there laughing at an Englishman making fun of their culture. Ten years ago, he’d have been lucky to get out of the theatre in one piece.