Last night, I watched Charlie Brooker’s Death to 2020. Prior to watching this, the news had come in that the UK was bumping all areas up to a higher tier for safety against the coronavirus. And only then did it feel like this whole experience, which will surpass a year soon, has been like a delirium.
Surreal.
It is easy to get caught up in all that has happened – and that’s by far the easiest cause of action, to get carried along with the disturbingly-warm current of new information and events around the world. Time has been skewed this year. I keep saying that I returned home from university in May, when actually it was March, as this pandemic life didn’t seem to have started that early on in 2020.
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Brooker’s comedic dissection of the year is, in part, fictionalised and does a spectacular job at pointing and laughing at the inanity of what’s gone on. And yet, is poignant. I think it’s important to be allowed to feel dazed by the year, the silliness of political leaders and abject, heart-breaking vacuous actions of people outside of our reach. At one point, one of Brooker’s characters remarks on having a tear in her eye when Biden was elected as America’s next president. Having smiled up until this moment at Death to 2020, I was thrown back in time to September when I felt that almost hollowing relief of that election result.
For me, the takeaway feeling of 2020 is infuriating confusion. The repeated ludicrousness of how people are acting and the confusion that all this has happened before. Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist nut, but in terms of the pandemic, it has happened before – and the result of too-late action has landed us in this cycle of lockdowns. And it’s down to unshakeable, human behaviour. And that should be in-part genuinely funny as it is worrying.
‘I’ve studied human behaviour long enough to get sick of it.’ Says the behavioural therapist character, Dr. Maggie Gravel.
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But the vaccine is on the horizon, and personally, a sense of calm is approaching me. It’s my good old phrase of ‘could always be worse’, and you have to say this with a smile because otherwise it doesn’t quite work at reminding you it’s okay to smile and shake your head at the world.
But this isn’t a challenge for 2021 to be worse, it just can’t be. So I will be toasting the arrival of the new year at midnight and celebrate the wonder that is a brand new year in Earth's history - that, at the moment, could be anything it wants to be.
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