This is not a good time for those of us of a downbeat disposition. There are not many reasons to be cheerful if we dare to look ahead. The world seems to be in deep trouble.

It has seemed like that many times throughout this century. It must have seemed like it to the Edwardians as the storm clouds gathered before 1914. It must have seemed like it to the inter-war generation passing through the Depression of the 1930s while Hitler flexed his muscles.

And it has seemed like that to my post-war generation ever since the first mushroom cloud rose up and blotted out the sun. It has never been the sort of world to encourage long-term planning. There has always appeared to be a strong likelihood that we would soon be paying the price for mankind's monstrous follies. We have lived with dread, and learned to cope with it.

There was a brief brightening when the Cold War ended. But it's all been downhill from there. The men who were once the two most powerful on the planet, the presidents of the US and Russia, have been holding a "summit" this week - a pathetic double act, one made a laughing stock by his lies and his sexual appetite, the other an alcoholic whose fellow countrymen can't wait to consign him to a vodka haze of oblivion.

When their two countries were officially sworn enemies, we worried but at least we knew where we stood. Each country had a structure, a philosophy and a government. Now no-one is in charge any longer. Russia's nuclear missiles are in the hands of soldiers who haven't been paid for months. The Mafia is running what's left of the economy.

All around the world economies are trembling if not collapsing. Financial markets are running scared. People who have known only prosperity are about to find out how the other half lives.

Different cultures are at loggerheads. Terrorists are doing their worst. Human behaviour, morally speaking, is going from bad to worse. Things are falling apart. And the new, up-and-coming generation is blowing its collective mind with every drug it can lay its hands on.

Woe, woe and ever more woe! It's not very encouraging, is it? Where do we go from here?

We do as we've always done. We strive to behave decently towards each other despite all the pressures coercing us to do otherwise. We batten down the hatches to keep panic contained. We smile as much as we can in these uncertain circumstances, over which we have so little control.

Above all, we hope - that sanity, common sense and basic human decency defeat the odds and prevail and that mankind's downhill race somehow can be stopped and turned around.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.