Just another year

What were you doing a year ago? If you were anything like me, you were preparing for just another year. The reports emerging from China (see above) weren’t really that concerning for Joe and Josephine Public, were they? We had heard about these killer viruses before – SARS, swine flu and so on – and none of them ever reached the UK. That the news channels placed the virus story just before the “and finally” story, when they bothered to include it at all, and you couldn’t really blame them. After all, only 30 people had gone down with this new virus and the previous SARS virus had ‘only’ killed hundreds of people. Cider I up, landlord, was my reaction.

I had things to do, people to see in 2020. A couple of lovely holidays in the sun, all manner of pubs to visit and friends to meet. Nothing’s gonna stop me now, I quickly concluded. Then, later in January, things weren’t looking quite so good. The number of infections was increasing and so was the death toll. But the Chinese were locking down and the virus wouldn’t escape would it? But the virus did spread and by March, Boris Johnson, the king clown of British politics, had ruffled his hair up to tell us we had to stay at home or die. Most of us did the former but many did both.

As of today, there have been 84,105,907 cases worldwide and 1,830,904 have died. That’s an increase of 84,105,877 cases in a year and 1,830,904 deaths. In the UK, our government has done particularly badly. We are currently in sixth place in the worldwide league table of cases – 2,542,065 – and rapidly closing in on France for fifth place. And we’re neck and neck with Italy in Europe in terms of deaths, with 74,125 so far, although the excess death total is far higher than that. In other words, things are grim and in the short term at least they are getting much, much worse.

Vaccines are coming to the rescue but infection numbers are going through the roof, with over 50,000 new cases every day at the moment. This is translating into more hospitalisations and more deaths. I don’t so much have a new year ‘s resolution so much as an ambition to still be alive by the time my vaccine arrives.

There are countless things I want to do, of course, and many of them will be bucket list items, like actually going train spotting on Shap Summit in Cumbria, going to the Hay on Way book festival, plane spotting at Manchester airport, seeing bands I’ve never gotten around to seeing, lowering the Everest sized pile of unread books on the landing, that kind of thing. None of these things will be possible if I pop my clogs in the coming weeks and months. Not dying, at least not this year, is highest in my list of priorities. Heaven, not that it exists, can wait.

COVID-19 has shown us how life can change in a relative instant. One moment we are planning a family holiday in Croatia, the next we are locked down in an endless shit show. Hope springs eternal, wrote Alexander Pope in 1732 (it says on the internet, so it must be true). I have felt both hopeless and out of hope in recent days, weeks and months and my glass is half empty (and never half full). But half empty is something and perhaps I can top it up from that great beer barrel of hope. And maybe, just maybe, 2021 really will be just another year?