Year of the Metal Rabbit 

Your Year of Unlimited Success

You will not be offered a starring role in next year’s art-house award-winner, nor will your rainy weekend novel surpass the Bone People.  Your photograph will not appear in New Weekly, the Women’s Weekly or Time.

Your Year of Boundless Love

Your doorstep will not be littered with long-stemmed roses.  Dogs won’t follow you in the street.

Your Year of Supreme Wealth

Your garage will not house a Roller, a Beamer or a Jag.  No holiday home in Tuscany will materialise.  You will continue not to take up ostrich farming.

Your year of Spiritual Fulfilment

Life will not grow increasingly astral.  You will refrain from relocating to a small hut on top of a mountain.

Your Year of Invention and Discovery

You will neglect to entertain your friends with tales of combing the catacombs for relics of lost deities or your explorations of Amazonian rainforests to find the tiny liane that will cure leukaemia.  You will not build a perpetual motion machine in your garden shed.

Your Year of Looking in the Mirror

You will, however, have the endless compassion of the once teased, the eternal gratitude of every small creature you rescue from the dangers of the footpath, and a smile that reaches from here to the brilliance of hope.  Enjoy your year; you deserve it.