In my final contribution for 2009 I’ll be the first to round up some reflections for the year on today’s turbulent times.

The Tora Bora continues to be as impregnable (and irrelevant) as ever. The seasonal message we can expect soon from there or from the current HQ will confirm the world is getting no wiser and no safer nor learning from its mistakes.

A visit to Venice early in the year gave me a reminder that being a nomadic European with such history, culture, architecture and traditions on our doorstep means a lot. But climate change makes it very fragile. I admired Gaddafi’s black humour on a more recent visit to Italy, inviting hundreds of Berlusconi maidens to a party in Rome for conversion to Islam.

This is the year when the US’ empire started to falter in ways that seriously point to a gradual long-term decline. Their charismatic president, already succumbing to the constraints and vested interests that were not visible on the campaign trail, is sending another big army into Tora Bora land to "close the stable door", before collecting his peace prize following a token appearance in Copenhagen to offer too little too late. China, India and Brazil are grabbing the headlines and becoming irreversibly dominant.

William Gladstone’s bicentennial reminded us that Bulgaria had friends in high places during their valiant attempts to overthrow oppression in the final years of the Turkish yoke. (The same eminent British prime minister founded 20 years earlier the school in the Scottish highlands where I was educated). It’s amazing that Roumyana Zheleva thought she might get the commissioner portfolio for enlargement, considering such a sensitive history with Turkey and Macedonia.

Human rights are still the subject of widespread abuse. From the Tora Bora to Africa, from some Middle Eastern and Asian countries to the top management ranks of the global banking and corporate world, women are being denied education, respect or equal standing. Some religions still accord them second class, if not persecuted, status. The latest revelations of child abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland put into context the justified but hypocritical disapproval by Western media of Bulgaria’s record regarding care of children in institutions.

The recession is not over. The bubble that is going to take most financial institutions and investment funds into the "double dip" so widely forecast, has now burst in Dubai. From my own recent visit to family living and working there, it is not difficult to see with hindsight that the hugely extravagant and over-ambitious developments in the Emirate were a case of pride comes before a fall. No hiding places like the Tora Bora here: but many innocent people will be hurt before a return, on a lower, re-scheduled, cost base, to business as usual.

My own country is muddling along with its island economy while under-performing against mainland Europe and other successful manufacturing and trading nations. The embattled prime minister having failed to hand the reins to Miliband or Mandelson in time to save socialism, will soon be ousted by a highly polished young conservative aristocrat who, perversely, will go down better with Sarkozy and Merkel even though he had hoped to remain a eurosceptic.

Finally, hope has returned to Bulgaria. We are benefiting from a government not encumbered by a coalition, and increasing numbers of troublemakers from the past are being extracted from their caves in the Sredna Gora to face justice.