To make this year’s predictions I watched a few episodes of the little-known 1980s Jimmy Perry sitcom Oh, Doctor I Ching! (starring Paul Shane made up as a nineteenth century Chinese fortune-teller from Rotherham) and matched the patterns generated from the resulting vomit to the wallpaper in John Lewis. Then, treating the price of each roll of wallpaper as a page number, I wrote down the first letter on each corresponding page of Dan Brown’s latest magnum o’pus The Lost Symbol (discarding the inevitable second wave of vomiting this induced). I used this sequence of gibberish (the letters, not the book) as the identifier part of the URL for a YouTube video: this turned out to be a montage of lolcat images set to a Rick Astley track. Playing this track backwards at half-speed revealed the address of a milliners in Covent Garden, wherein an elderly lady whisked me through a secret door to a spiral staircase leading to a disused underground station. Here the King of the Rats welcomed me with a garland of cigarette butts and his Rat Army carried me aloft to the Rat Parliament (changing at Leicester Square). The secrets revealed to me there by the Prime Ministrat were world-shattering and scandalous but ultimately all about rats so I just knocked up any old rubbish as usual and here it is.
The Oscars
- Best Actor: Colin Firth, A Single Man
- Best Actress: Meryl Streep, Julie and Julia
- Best Original Screenplay: District 9
- Best Director: James Cameron, Avatar
- Best Picture: Up in the Air
UK General Election
- The election takes place on March 25th
- Predicted share: Con 39%, Lab 32%, Lib Dem 21%
- Predicted seats: Con 296, Lab 267, Lib Dem 56
- A Green party MP is elected
- Esther Rantzen wins Luton South
Entertainment
- ITV closes down ITV3 and ITV4 to save money
- Britain’s Got Talent contestants include a trio of drag artistes collectively known as The Fleurettes
- Robbie Williams rejoins Take That for at least one concert
- The final UK Big Brother is won by a lesbian
Science
- The Large Hadron Collider does not find the Higgs Boson this year
- Exoplanet GJ 1214b is confirmed as a water ocean planet with an atmosphere
Sport
- Winter Olympics: Great Britain win one gold medal, one silver medal and zero bronze medals
- World Cup semi-finalists (in no particular order): England, Brazil, Denmark, Argentina
- Cambridge win the University Boat Race
- Andy Murray wins a grand slam singles tournament
- A fatal accident occurs during the construction of Olympic Park in Stratford
Celebrity Deathwatch
- The Duke of Edinburgh
- Jimmy Young
- Jimmy Saville
- James Garner
- Lady Gaga
- Ian Paisley
Avaragado's blog 
There’s no way the GE is on any day other than May 6.
That’s still the most likely date, I know. But Faisal Islam wrote an interesting blog that suggests March 25th might be a good bet (http://blogs.channel4.com/snowblog/2010/01/06/happy-days-for-beleaguered-brown-could-mean-a-march-poll/).