Well my friends, what a year eh? There we were emerging from Winter’s gloom through January & February and then it all got very weird. It still feels weird. I keep hearing the phrase ‘The New Normal’ but what the hell does that actually mean? Speaking to others and from my own experience, I’ll tell you what it means – the concept of time just goes bat-shit crazy and it leaves us as these objects which appear to be normal on the outside but on the inside, there is a constant feeling of “Where the hell am I and what’s happening?”
I’ve come to the conclusion that, in normal times, there must be invisible ‘markers‘ over the course of 12 months which tell the subconscious where we are in relation to the time of year. I don’t know what these markers are. They don’t seem to be external events like Easter, Bank Holidays, or Xmas nor do they appear to be determined by the weather and the passing of the seasons. Without exception, everyone I’ve spoken to has admitted to experiencing the same kind of brain fog and can’t comprehend that another Xmas is racing towards us. Days, weeks & months just dissolve into some kind of ‘time blob’ where we know things have happened but we have no handle on when they did. In short, I have a worse memory than Jason Bourne.
I was looking at the inside of my kitchen window the other day (well, OK, I was staring into space in the vague direction of the back garden) and I thought to myself “Blimey, that looks a bit grubby but I’m sure I only cleaned it a few weeks ago.” No, it was back in the Summer, Q.E.D. The time blob has reduced me to only being able to quantify what day of the week it is by which little door I open on my medication dispenser. In addition, I now make sure I wear a watch with a date AND day display so that I can continually check it during waking hours to remind myself where I am in the week. My only other hope of gaining some sort of reference is to stare at the wall planner in the back bedroom as if I were examining the minute details of the Mona Lisa. The trouble is that, like her, the planner just stares back at me in a rather vague and enigmatic way.
World events just rumble along in the background. The Government continues to cock everything up, still hands out multi-million-pound contracts to their mates and party supporters without going through a formal tendering process and it is all overseen by an over-privileged, under-qualified, old Etonian, fop-haired cock waffle.
As a nation, outrageous actions like their spending millions of tax payer’s cash on unusable PPE and voting to starve vulnerable children, are no longer met with the sort of red mist and rage that we used to feel. Now, there is an immediate feeling of anger but that quickly dissipates into a collective thought of “It’s 2020, MPs are still the same old bastards, what did we expect?!” As well as fumbling the pandemic, we are also about to crash out of Europe and nobody in real life knows what the hell that will mean for our day-to-day lives. Boris made a big hoo-haa about having an ‘oven-ready Brexit deal” which was ready to be “popped in the microwave.” Hmm, I think we all now realise that his deal is far from being oven-ready – it seems that it is still busy chewing the cud and shitting in a field somewhere. Apologies to all non-carnivores out there.
Then we get to Trump….dear God, what can you say? Sometimes, the English language just doesn’t have enough negative adjectives. My biggest worry is that half the country still voted for the hamster-haired satsuma despite the shit-fest buffoonery of the last 4 years. I find that quite incredible and I apologise to my American friends but certain areas of your gene pool desperately need new filters. I sincerely wish that he gets locked in a sound-proof cell with no Internet access and he takes his political & moral ethics with him. If Hitler was still alive, even he would look at Trump and shake his head in disbelief.
So, will 2021 be a ‘Happy New Year’? Christ, I hope so. 2020 feels like a bad movie franchise that has long outstayed its welcome. In the name of all that’s holy, roll the final credits and be gone I say!!
I hope that you all find some scrap of enjoyment in the coming Xmas and that 2021 greets you with a welcoming smile, sans face mask.
Yo-ho-ho.