This is the season when newspaper columnists are expected to pull on their Old Moore outfits and have a stab at predicting the year ahead. Forgive me, but I opted out of this hackneyed tradition years ago, even though I'd never really taken it seriously. No matter how outrageous or spectacularly silly my forecasts, they rarely came anywhere close to anticipating what fresh madness the next 12 months had in store. This year the Butterfly Effect has been working overtime. Chaos theory holds that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon can trigger an unstoppable chain reaction which leads to a tornado on the other side of the world.