Annus Maximus Horribilis

It’s the last day of 2016 and it has certainly turned out a year to remember – or at least one that I think many of us would rather forget. We seem to have lost so many high profile and much loved celebrities, often those who have excelled in their field, that I have lost count. Just a few include Caroline Aherne, Jean Alexander, Muhammad Ali, David Bowie, Ronnie Corbett, Leonard Cohen, Johan Cruyff, Paul Daniels, Carrie Fisher, John Glenn, Frank Kelly, Greg Lake, George Martin, George Michael, Michael Nicholson, Rick Parfitt, Prince, Debby Reynolds, Alan Rickman, Andrew Sachs, Gene Wilder, Terry Wogan, Victoria Wood and Jimmy Young. That’s just of the top of my head (in alphabetical order) so we really have been losing a lot of the the good guys. It’s got to the point that I’m afraid to switch on the news to see who has gone next. As one of my friends pointed out, it’s almost like a biblical rapture of public figures.

Of course there are world events and aside from the hideous civil war in Syria and the less visible carnage in Yemen we have had the United States move from the world’s greatest democracy to the world’s largest cretinocracy by electing the nylon-haired abomination that is Donald Trump as their president. Just how, exactly did that happen? Unfortunately, Britain is no better and arguably a lot worse by voting for Brexit. I’m not quite sure which is worse, the utter pain in the arse process which will drag on for ever with little if any benefit and a whole world of pain to endure or the fact that this dreadful, ugly portmanteaux has entered the lexicon: it apparently has no meaning: “Brexit means Brexit” isn’t a definition, it’s a tautology.

If the fact that we have lost so many well-loved people and that the world has gone insane wasn’t bad enough 2016 turns out to be one of the longest on record (only 1972 was longer). It is an  annus maximus horribilis – a great big bum year. Not only is it a leap year but we also get a leap second just before midnight on the 31st of December as the good folk at the National Physical Laboratory have decided that this would be a good time to make a necessary adjustment to the world’s clocks. So, even at the very end, some bastard has caused the year to be dragged out to its very longest possible duration.

Of course it is always possible that this surreally insane and miserable year is actually just a bad dream. We will wake up at some point on Sunday morning, rather hungover, to find out that the lunatics haven’t taken over the asylum and we get Bowie, Rickman, Fisher et al back.  That only seems slightly more bizarre than the year we have just experienced but somehow I feel that some dreams do come true and it’s usually the bad ones. Maybe 2017 will be better? Either that or World War Three, here we come…