What A Relief.

Not a spot of profanity in sight. I can do it, but it just feels like swearing is always so much easier.

Well, that’s another year done and dusted. Another year further from the happiness of youth (applicable only if you had a happy one) and another year closer to a death we can’t yet see coming, even though we are cursed to know that coming it very much is. It’s been a glitter-bleak, up-and-down sort of a Christmas and I’ll be glad to get to 2024 alive (a minority wish, I appreciate) if not necessarily in ideal shape. But you can’t blame me for all the doom and gloom, I serve only to react to various kinds of stupidity and then report my findings back to you; if things were better out there I’d be full of the joys of spring every minute of the day, give or take. I’ve been wracking my brain (which doesn’t take long) today trying to think about a single upbeat piece of news from the last 12 months but nothing springs to mind. It’s poetic justice really, payback for all our relentless progress and our shiny-eyed avarice and cruelty. For all we’ve done and all we’re likely to do. Happy New Year indeed.

Gently scouring the final Sunday Times Magazine of 2023 it appears some clever dick has compiled a list of all the good things that have happened this year. It’s not a bad idea in principle but it seems a bit rich for the media to suddenly turn and invite us to celebrate positivity, growth and joy when it has spent the other 364 days of the year ramming grey handfuls of miserable, speculative, life sapping detritus down our open gullets. That said, I’m very happy about the first baby beaver to be spotted in London for 400 years and all the new rhinos and tigers that might just get through their lives without being poached to death, and that the Ugandan mountain gorilla has been brought back from the brink of permanent invisibility. I’m glad the River Mersey has been cleaned up and that traffic has been banned from central Lisbon and that assorted South Americans have decided to chainsaw down just a few less trees this year than they did the one before. Really. I’m glad.

And my gladness doesn’t stop there, though there are some conditional intricacies that might be worth raising. I’m glad, for instance, that the British government have proposed to ban wet wipes containing plastic in an effort to heal our bloated sewers, but shouldn’t they have done that years ago, when the problem was first identified? I’m glad that China may be about to enter their first year as not the world’s top polluter, but they should hardly be given a sticker and a handshake just because some other country has managed to pump out a bit more toxic fog for a change. I’m thrilled that we continue to fight cervical, lung, prostate, colon and breast cancer (at least I’m very unlikely to get all five at once) with ever more aplomb and that we’re making breakthrough moves against Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s but there is a part of me that wonders precisely where we’re going to put all the extra lives this will save. I hope they’re not expecting to stay with me.

Elsewhere we can all celebrate millions more girls attending schools across the world. We can gather together to cheer on ever more liberal attitudes towards sexual and gender freedom and perhaps the chance one day that all people will be able to do whatever they want with themselves, provided they recognise that you can’t just grow different genitals by magic. We should applaud the slow eradication of female genital mutilation (which is for life, not just for Christmas) though we are duty bound to thoroughly question why we live in a world where a single case of it should ever exist in the first place. On top of all this, apparently cases of child marriages are firmly on the decline, there are 80% fewer nuclear weapons now than in 1986 (though it still only takes one naughty boy to fire the first one), Britain’s children are the fourth best readers in the world (or at least the ones left that still read are) and India has finally hit one of the most expensive and meaningless targets a nation can ever wish for and landed a spacecraft on the moon.

So you can see that things are really looking up, or so we’re told. Because ultimately we’re only ever going to find out this stuff if we’re told it, the one great downside to which being who has the faintest idea what to trust anymore? I wish I had just managed to dodge colon cancer or genital mutilation or a nuclear warhead because then I’d be living proof that things really might be all good and well one day, but when I switch on the news or go out in the car I’m just not seeing the bright lights of a fresh new horizon. It’s not as if I can even cheer myself up with some non-news television tonight as all the BBC has decided to offer is an evening with Rick Astley, Rylan Clark and Sharleen Spiteri, a triptych of such unbearable magnolia that suddenly starting a new job as a plastic wet wipe fatberg eliminator seems like a sweet release. But all that aside I do hope 2024 will see something good; something tangibly, instantly recognisably, undeniably good unfold. I could do with some cheering up and I don’t think it’s too presumptuous to say I can’t be the only one. Let’s wait and see.

G B Burton. 31.12.2023