NEW Year. Time to look ahead and hopefully see beyond the debris of last year’s personal disappointments, the disasters and the daftness. As John Steinbeck said; “A little hope, even hopeless hope, never hurt anybody.”

What we do know is that those who can shape and inform our lives will offer up hope and optimism because the Herald has gained information on each of the Santa books they received.

Nicola Sturgeon, we have on good authority, was given a colouring book for Christmas. This will guarantee the FM becomes very good indeed at colouring in between the lines, which of course will translate into Scotland’s economic future.

As a result, the SNP and its 14 spin doctors will no longer be reliant on the insistence each party member uses the sweeping phrase ‘The people of Scotland have voteed’ at least three times in each interview, instead offering up the assuaging sureness of specifics that will see us hold hands happily, like children in a playground.

You’re not convinced? Well, we also know that MS Sturgeon was given a copy of RD Laing’s The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. Laing maintained that schizophrenia and mental illness didn’t stem from the individual; it was society itself which was sick, and fractured family units played a major part in facilitating mental illness.

The FM read this the minute Gavin and Stacey was over, realised she represents a fractured family of five million people, and the feuding is set to begin in earnest. As this is written, we can hear the sound of the soap box being broken up for firewood and the clunk of tin as the rambling rhetoric is binned.

Meanwhile, Ruth Davidson has had her feet up enjoying a Cadbury’s selection box and Robert Evans’ The Kid Stays in The Picture, the second greatest comeback tale since the Resurrection, (the greatest being the return of Still Game to the TV screen and the Hydro stage). Scottish politics needs to hear that challenging voice.

As for Richard Leonard, the Scottish Labour leader has been given a copy of Toby Young’s How to Lose Friends And Alienate People yet at the moment hasn’t joined the dots while his personal Bruce Wayne Jeremy Corbyn has had his head stuck in reading Wilde’s a Portrait of Dorian Grey. Corbyn, we’ve learned, simply loves the book, empathising entirely with the central character a man with his head in an attic who looks in the mirror at an image which hasn’t altered one little bit since the Seventies.

As for the Prime Minister, his partner Carrie Symonds pulled the copy of Pole Dancing for the Portly out of his hands and replaced it with Rasputin: The Biography, by Douglas Smith. Already, Boris Johnson has been heard to yelp in realisation; “Crikey. There’s a lot of the Dominic Cummings about this chappy!”

What we’ve all got to look forward to however is the Impeachment of the President of the United States. Of course there is more chance of the vinegar oil stain on my best suit trousers being removed than of the Senate spanking Donald Trump hard. But we can wallow in the process, the squirming, because the members of the upper house have all been sent a copy of Do the Right Thing, by former Arkansas Governor and Christian Minister Mike Huckabee. Huckabee’s argument was for a fairer, smarter type of politics that relied upon common sense and decency. Steinbeck once said the power of the president is a moral power. He was right on the money.

There’s more fun to be had in the year ahead.

Boris Johnson has given Michael Gove a copy of Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar, which may not be unconnected to the fact that just three years ago Gove claimed Johnson to be unfit for leadership. Watching the pair together will be like being at a dinner party with an divorced couple, the husband having had a fling with the baby sitter and the wife her tennis coach, by way of revenge.

Everyone however should read Moss Hart’s Act One. The playwright wrote the best autobiography ever, of his life and times growing up in a Brooklyn slum, of creating his first play at 15 and going on to write with George Kaufman.

But just as importantly, Hart titled his memoir Act One because he figured on writing the follow up, Act Two and perhaps even Act Three. (In those days three-act plays were common.) Hart however didn’t make it to Act Two. We need to remember that and make the most of a terrific New Year.