Every year fo the last few ears, I have written a little end of year review. Why? It’s not as if many people will read it. Perhaps it’s to try and make sense of the world for myself. This year however, no matter how hard I try, is the year in which (cue Trumpian all caps) NOTHING MAKES ANY SENSE ANYMORE.
April saw first image of a black hole. Of course you can’t actually see a black hole, because it’s black. How much blacker could it be your may ask? The answer is none, none more black. The catchily named M-87 is 53 million light years away so there’s no danger of it sucking up the Earth into its mysterious void – which given the current state of things is a bit of a disappointment.
Greta Thunberg was one of the big names of 2019 though some people did seem to get exceptionally irate at the idea that a young girl wasn’t spending her time posting selfies on Instagram and instead had taken up the more frivolous pursuit of trying to save the world. Middle aged men got particularly uppity about Greta, perhaps out of jealousy that she’s managed to get a few million people together on a Friday whilst they can’t convince their old schoolmate ‘Digsy’ to go the local Wetherspoons. It came as a surprise to no one that flabby chopped man-baby Jeremy Clarkson took a pop at her. Mind you, he takes a pop at anyone he fears will curb his access to turbo-charged knob wagons and hot pies.
Once again the thing that has dominated to news has been Brexit. I can’t actually remember what life was like pre Brexit now. I have a vague recollection of no one actually giving a toss about membership of the EU. Now it’s a never ending tirade of news and opinions. I can’t think of any other issue which has dominated the media for over three years. It’s like Bryan Adams’ Everything I Do’ in political form.
Brexit seemed to have influenced this year’s Britain’s Got Talent, with a pub singing Chelsea Pensioner crowned winner. It seems the UK is desperate to return to the good old days of rationing and millions of people being killed. Many people like to talk about the ‘Blitz spirit’ and everyone ‘pulling together’ after Brexit – but is there actually anyone out there who could genuinely say “you know the reason I haven’t said a word to my neighbours for the last 10 years? It’s the bloody EU!”
Prince Andrew went on telly to categorically prove that if you’re rich you can get away with anything. Putting forward the worst case for defence since Shaggy’s ‘It Wasn’t Me’ he argued that his major failing in life was being ’too honourable’ – something akin to Fred West saying his downfall was a strong sense of family vales. Following the interview Prince Andrew has stepped down from his work, but I’m not entirely sure what that work was. I had a look on Linkdin but couldn’t see any new job vacancies for ‘International Sex Offender’.
Undeniably the ‘Man of the Year’ was Boris Johnson, and by ‘Man of the Year’ I mean man I would most like to see hung drawn a quartered before a crowd of braying homosexuals, Muslims, single mothers, Liverpudlians, victims of terror attacks, and anyone else he’s ever denigrated, which come to think about it, is pretty much everyone except Winston Churchill and Jeremy Clarkson. Boris has spent years machinating over when was the right time to pounce upon the Tory leadership, and because he’s so fundamentally useless himself he had wait until they had a leader so devoid of personality that when called upon to ‘dance like a human’ revealed that her programming only contained algorithms for ‘dance like a robot’.
Then came the election which had all the qualities of a Ray Cooney farce. Boris Johnson could have been a kind of Robin Askwith character in ‘Confessions of a Randy MP’. Imagine the hilarity of Bonking Boris with his trousers down, hiding in the fridge from Jeremy Corbyn as the holier than thou vicar who’d come around to drop off some jam only to find a pole dancing American au pair about to do a runner with two suitcases full of cash. Michael Gove turns up as the local drug dealer, Mark Francios does a comedy turn as Captain Mainwaring and Jacob Rees Mogg is flown in on wires as The Ghost of Victorian Workhouses.
The result had a grim inevitability and when it came I genuinely felt about as low as I ever felt. It was a feeling that I had no comprehension of the country in which I lived, that values like honesty and kindness were now meaningless. I’ve felt like an outsider all my life, but I used to think I had a vague understanding of what I was outside of. Then I saw that a novelty song about sausage rolls was top of the charts and it all started to make sense.
All of this unrelenting awfulness has made me think about how we got to where we are now. So here I’m going to ‘drop’ my ‘hot take’ for 2019 – it’s all the fault of the internet. It’s astonishing to think that the World Wide Web (actually faster to say than its acronym) was created to share scientific data and now it’s facilitated a growing brief in a flat earth and helped certain diseases, once practically eradicated, return with a vengeance. Pre internet if you wanted share a bonkers theory your best bet was to photocopy a few leaflets and stand on a street corner shouting about it. The chances of being able to share your ideas with the world at large were negligible because to be published or broadcast at least required some degree of scrutiny. Now it a free for all. Now ‘Conspiracy Colin’ from Ipswich has found ‘Paranoid Pam’ from Idaho and suddenly they have a group of like minded thinkers. Facts are meaningless, as is rational thinking, because I guess a very fundamental human instinct is the desire to be part of a group. I blame the lizard people.
So farewell to the 2010s. I can’t say I’m going to miss you.
I’ll leave with this quote from Joesph Conrad:
“We live in the flicker – may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.”
The darkness is here today. Let’s hope we can turn the lights back on.