Morning:
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If, in the thin light of this final day of December, you feel you have aged rather too much in 2008, don't feel too surprised. A single year has contained enough changes for an epoch.
Consider what we leave behind as another annus - at once mirabilis and horribilis - is consigned to memory.
Twelve months ago, the relentless Hillary Clinton was holding firm against the supernova of Barack Obama and the main topic of conversation in London was how unfeasibly high house prices were.
The Tories were still the optimistic new Greens, promising to match Labour spending to show their caring side. Mr Brown was still talking of "no return to boom and bust" - and Boris Johnson's mayoral campaign was in the doldrums.
At the end of the year, all this and far more has inverted. London has a Tory mayor: an unthinkable in the heyday of Ken Whatsisname. Mr Cameron and Mr Brown drew a new and bitter dividing line over their approach to the economy, Mrs Clinton has had to make do with a consolation prize in the great Washington power battle and the talk is of how low house prices will go.
Two key turning points made 2008 set the direction and challenges of all our futures: a new president and a financial crisis of historic proportions.
These are interconnected changes. The Bush presidency left America exhausted, divided and frustrated. But many of the problems which weighed down his presidency persist under the more emollient and engaging figure of Mr Obama because they were not, as so often derided, the self-made errors of one limited politician but a struggle with the contradictions of the age which are not easily to be smoothed away.
Mr Bush suffered from two colliding perceptions: he embodied an America which could "sort out" the world and could be relied upon by others to take the lead after 9/11; and a reputation for callous inefficiency gained in the blighted aftermath of the war in Iraq and never lost, as he heads unmourned for retirement next month.
Recently, I re-fought the Iraq war (in the armchair sense) with someone who, unlike me, was against it from the start. We agreed to disagree, as people say who really don't agree on much at all, about what we learn from such things.
But one point made me wince for Presidency Obama. I asked my acquaintance, who blamed America for mishandling the unholy trio of Iraq, Afghanistan and now a highly unstable Pakiskstan, what advice she would give him on changing tack. "I wouldn't start from here," was the answer.
Well, politicians do "start from here" - even if "here" is not where they would like to be. That is what electorates expect them to do. It is on Mr Obama's shoulders that the pressure to do something constructive now rests.
So he is prodded to act on Gaza, even before he has wiped his feet on the White House mat: many instinctive Obama-ites will side against Israel this week. He has the more judicious task of building a relationship that can broker peace from the shattered fragments of yet another bloody outbreak.
Mr Obama and his fellow world leaders face one of the biggest tasks in re-ordering the international system: how to allow the free market the creativity and freedoms that a growth-dependent societies expect, while ensuring that the lapses which brought so many banks to the brink can never recur.
One lesson should be taken seriously here: the reason that warning signs about excessive borrowing and bad practices were ignored was because they came from quarters few of the interested parties had an interest in heeding.
So Gordon Brown, a centre-Left politician, had long since colluded in the credit boom to create a generalised prosperity, allowing him scope for his beloved taxation. At the same time, a generation of Conservatives lauding wealth creation were reluctant to sound alarm bells about the shaky foundations of that wealth until it was too late.
The main task of the political parties now is not to wreak more damage than has already been wreaked. Both should beware their own hype. When Mr Cameron finishes the year saying that Mr Brown is "bombing Britain to the brink of bankruptcy", he should listen to his own shrill tone and ask whether it will strengthen his claim to be a steady and mature leader in office - seeing as he might have to deal with real bombings then.
Equally, when Mr Brown chants that the recession was "made in the USA", his nose should grow a good centimetre longer with every repetition of this meretricious half-truth.
Bad American debt did spark this crisis but the public finances in Britain are ultimately the business of Her Majesty's Government, not the Fed or the unlamented Mr Bush. If Mr Brown will not take responsibility for the past, he can barely expect us to trust him with the future.
The Prime Minister has had a remarkable year of reversals. He started it several poll points adrift of the Tories as his cancelled election came home to roost. He had a near-death experience in the summer after the loss of two key by-elections. There was never a clear "trigger" to get rid of him - but he suffered a corrosive loss of faith which could easily have become irreversible.
Poetic justice (sometime) prevails: Gordon's redemption came, in the severity and suddenness of the banking crisis, which gave him a subject, the economy, on which he feels confident to lead and did not lurk in his predecessor's shadow.
The likelihood must, however, remain that a government in power in a serious recession and in its 12th year in office will harvest voters' dissatisfaction rather than gratitude: which makes the subject of an early election hard to ignore, however loath he is to show it.
If we started 2008 with illusions of perpetual good times, no one harbours them now. The blunt edge of the downturn will soon hit us very hard, emotionally as well as financially.
Already, the prospect of a new austerity has yielded fresh interest in cheap and simple pleasures. Mamma Mia! became the biggest-selling DVD of all time because it captures the desire of anxious societies to look backwards and to find comfort in laughter, trivia and brightness.
Strictly Come Dancing moved from mere Saturday night entertainment to national craze in the same vein of Busby Berkeley escapism. A good dose more of that will be needed in the year ahead.
If we learn one more lesson, it is that nothing is pre-ordained or inevitable. We may not all relish the prospect of 2009 when we reach for the aspirin tomorrow. But take heart - on the basis of what has just gone, it won't be dull.
