It's got to be a better year than the last one given how bad that was, and better still than the year before that which was the pits. But it's unlikely to be great.
The pandemic's still with us and surging out of control with record numbers of cases thanks to the extra-transmissible omicron variant, and millions have been out socialising for Christmas and New Year because they've been allowed to which is all very well but was only ever going to spread the virus far and wide into age groups and parts of the country it hadn't properly touched yet, so that's a further exponential increase locked in no matter what we do next despite everyone thinking they couldn't be positive because they'd taken a frankly unreliable test, and assuming they could get hold of any tests because delivery has been a totally unreliable shambles just when we really needed everything to work smoothly, but why should we expect any better of our at best inept at worst corrupt government who've been flinging public money at their mates ever since all this began, we could hardly have done worse that being governed by a lackadaisical Prime Minister beholden to a deranged pack of swivel-eyed backbenchers whose insistence on prioritising freedom over science and business over health is delivering us into a dangerous free market dystopia where our public services face further cuts on top of a decade of salami-slicing and deliberate sabotage, so I fear for local councils and the NHS and the BBC because under this government they're always under threat, especially now that the pandemic has forced ministers to rack up monstrous debts while trying to keep a lid on the economy which has likely destabilised our public finances for years to come and it's perfectly possible we may never regain our former standard of living, indeed 2022 may ultimately be seen as the 1947 of the 21st century, a grey year on the painfully slow climb out of austerity, an inexorable blight on the hopes of a generation who've cruelly had countless opportunities permanently swept away, not to mention the damage done by disrupting health checks for the best part of two years as innumerable body parts go more wrong more quickly than they would have done otherwise which is a thoroughly grim legacy for the future, because while lockdown might have saved lives it's also cost them too, and there's a fine dividing line between enabling choice and restricting behaviour and I can't see our current leaders getting the balance right even as things improve, which hopefully they will because this omicron variant looks milder than previous strains and it would be brilliant if evolution finally drove out the harsher less infectious variants, but that's just the kind of blue skies thinking which is currently lulling the general public into a false sense of security as they go about their everyday business thinking we're through the worst so they can completely let their guard down, and tens of thousands more people are going to die before we get out of this, assuming we ever do because the virus may always be with us from now on and the government insists we're just going to have to learn to live with it, which is great if you're healthy enough for it not to kill you but do stop and think of those yet to be picked off through no fault of their own, plus those whose health will be blighted by prolonged after-effects or other conditions that have already slipped through the net, and don't forget that even in a normal year hundreds of your favourite people die because life's cruel like that, be that close family or older celebrities, even Sir David Attenborough's got to go eventually, the only certainty is change and not all change is good as we'll likely discover when another unexpected variant emerges and turns out to be worse, because that's where vaccine hesitancy and unavailability ultimately leads, plus there's always the chance of a completely new pandemic breaking through at some point and we might not be so lucky there, imagine if 2019 was as good as it ever gets, even with this bumbling clown at the helm because if you think the current Prime Minister is bad wait until you see the next one, and then consider the damage that could be done by a competent leader intent on dismantling society to create a small state economy where only roguish free marketeers thrive because that's the governing party we actually voted in at the last election and the next is still years away, and inflation could still be horrifically high by then and have taken a huge bite taken out of your savings, assuming you have any, not to mention all the intended infrastructure projects that'll have to be mothballed or cancelled because we simply can't afford them, and that sound you can hear is a nation's hope and optimism gurgling away down a budgetary plughole, its population increasingly weighed down by a barrage of wilful misinformation and baseless fury in a world of caution rather than adventure and restrictions rather than joy, and then there's climate change because that's not going away any time soon, as this current record-breakingly mild weather suggests, and OK environmental armageddon is likely to be painstakingly slow and incremental but it's only ever going to make our lives more difficult especially those of us living near the coast, and once that Thwaites glacier collapses or the Gulf Stream shifts we'll be in uncharted waters with no going back, indeed one day we might look back on 2021 and wish life was that simple again, but human spirit and ingenuity will always get us through because we're a resilient bunch, as proven by the global crisis we've somehow managed to get through recently, because it turns out things are rarely as bad as the worst case scenarios suggest, that is unless we finally get that long promised solar flare or artificial intelligence gets too clever or some other world-ending blip from the planetary risk register actually materialises, and basically what I'm saying is don't assume 2022 has got to be better than 2021 because it might not be and we could just be on a downward spiral, but let's hope not because hope and ingenuity and human spirit is all we have.
Happy New Year, and well done for getting here because that was never a given.
