Those New Year firework displays told us a lot about the year we have in store. In Manchester, nary a sparkler sputtered into life.

In London, Big Ben was spitting flame like an angry Transformer. London was burning... and this time in a good way.

Perhaps our city fathers could have twisted corporate arms a bit more strongly to extract the £20,000 sponsorship for a Manchester firework show.

But it would inevitably have been a damp squib in comparison with London’s £4m conflagration. And, anyway, do we really need fireworks to welcome in every New Year? We seemed to manage perfectly well without them until just a few years ago.

Can a mob of well-lubricated revellers not be relied upon to sing, smooch and glad-hand their way to the next page of the calendar without a load of expensive whizz-bangs?

But in London, they stuck a rocket up the petticoats of austerity Britain.

This was a blazing statement of intent, a taste of things to come in a year when a familiar irksome metropolitan supremacy will reassert itself.

The Olympic games will be the story of 2012.

Even before the first race is run, the first drugs test failed, the news agenda will have come to be totally dominated by the games.

We will primp with pride at the facilities built in a hitherto godforsaken corner of the capital. We will constantly take the temperature of Olympic fever; do they really care about the games in the poor neighbourhoods a javelin’s throw from the stadium? If not, why not?

We will continue to grumble about the ticket allocation, and the self-appointed potentates of the Olympic "family" occupying cut price hotel rooms and being whisked around in so-called "Zil lanes".

But we will also make lions of every British athlete with the slenderest chances of a medal.

We will cogitate endlessly on the £9bn cost of this party, and the estimates of what that investment buys us in prestige and business on the world stage. That word "legacy" will be uttered every five minutes in discussions about whether London 2012 will prove an engine of regeneration, like Barcelona 1992, or a binge which leaves a whole nation with a bad hangover, witness Athens 2004.

We should care about it when the world's greatest sportsmen and women come to our shores to set new benchmarks for human achievement. But I think Sebastian Coe over-eggs it when he says the Olympics will be "the biggest thing this nation will have delivered in the living memory of the vast majority of the population".

Even for a substantial number of Londoners, the Olympics will be at best something good to watch on the telly, and at worst a huge inconvenience to their daily lives.

To the rest of Britain, the nearest they get to feeling a part of the Olympics may be a fleeting glimpse of the Olympic torch on its journey to somewhere more important.

I may yet discover in myself the same breathless enthusiasm for the games that Lord Coe thinks I should have.

I do know that, even if the Olympics are not the biggest thing that has ever happened to this nation, the coverage will make it seem so.

2012? It's all about London.

Get ready for enough days to put you in a daze

A date for your diary: Blue Monday – regarded as the most depressing day of the year – falls this year on Monday, January 16.

Coincidentally – or not – that Monday is also designated Fat Day, the day that British people feel their heaviest, according to a survey by cosmetic surgery provider Transform.

There is barely a date in the calendar which is not a "day" for something.

January 30 is Happy Monday – the first happy day of the year after Blue Monday, according to mental health "experts". Not so "happy" if that’s the day you get run over by a bus.

Love Yourself Day falls on February 13, which presumably prepares you for disappointment the following day, Valentine’s Day, which is also now

Thinking About Sex Day, formerly National Impotence Day.

Yes, some killjoy decreed that the day when, traditionally, our thoughts turn to love and romance should also be the day we take a look at sexual dysfunction.

I can understand why we need, on January 27, Holocaust Memorial Day.

I am flummoxed as to why the following day we need National Potato Day. Is the spud in danger of being forgotten?

And who’d have thought we needed a National Aunties Day, which falls on February 12?

Figure this out: World Religion Day is on January 15, and Woolly Hat Week begins on February 5. So we have just one day to focus on interfaith understanding and harmony, but a whole week to turn our thoughts to warm headgear.

Woe betide the employee who wags off work on February 6. You will be regarded not only as a skiver but also lacking in imagination, for this is National Sickie Day – the day when post-Christmas blues, poor weather and the length of time until summer holiday create a peak in absenteeism.

Of course, most of these "days" are now regular fixtures in the calendar. We've all been here before, not least on February 2... Groundhog Day.

Wednesday whinge

Is anyone else gobsmacked to discover that at least 944 police officers and police community support officers in England and Wales have a criminal record?

You can just about understand how even a bastion of society may pick up a speeding conviction.

But some of these coppers have convictions including burglary, dangerous driving, drink-driving, robbery, forgery and perverting the course of justice.

Surely crimes such as these should automatically disqualify you from a job upholding the law.

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