Apocalyptic: A Review of 2020

This is a true story

It was a chilly Tuesday, January 21st and the fire was roaring in the Craft Hotel. The pub was busier than expected on a midwinter night, but a lot of that might have been down to me. Two years earlier, in discussion with Sharon, the landlady, she had suggested she might shut on a Tuesday until the spring because of the lack of business. Tuesdays has for a few years been my night out - not exclusively, but it breaks the week up nicely and I only ever have up to 3 pints. I came up with this poster (below) and got my mate Patrick to print a couple off; it also featured on the Facebook and Twitter pages of various places and while Tuesdays were never like a busy night, for the next few months it was worthwhile staying open.

The weird thing is that Tuesdays are now always steady as a result, but this Tuesday, the hotel had three guests - an American lady and a young Chinese couple, who were actually on their honeymoon (Scotland at the end of January for a honeymoon?!?). Also in the pub was the landlady's estranged husband, Andy the local labourer and his mum Rose. Fearn was there, she'd just come off her shift, having been replaced by Louise, who pulled George and my pints. There were also two tables with familiar but not known people having meals and incomer Dave, from the North-east, who seems to only know you when he's trying to hawk a pint. And Sharon was in the kitchen with Zoe.

It was busy enough to make a comment about. However, the real conversation was this growing threat of a pandemic. It was now becoming more than a third story on the news and, of course, it started in China. The thing was, this was still January and while some people might have been panicking about the coming months, most of us were getting over last Christmas and looking forward to that happy new year we all strive for. So when the young Chinese lad - who was actually 35 but looked about 17 - asked Louise behind the bar what beer would she recommend, she turned to me and George for our expert advice.

"Try this." Says I, offering my pint to the young man. He did and ordered a pint. We got chatting, but he had no more info about what was going on than us and his English was weak. When they left for their room, Louise turned to me and said, "That was a hell o'a risk yus took. They're Chinese!" I made light of it and frankly while I did remain a bit worried over the coming week, it didn't really register that much until I sat down to write this review of the year. With hindsight, it was a pretty stupid thing to do even if it was with nothing but good intentions. That seems to be the best way to sum of 2020 as well in many ways...

Brown Liquid

In what has been a reasonable year for me, the first lockdown was good for me and the fine weather meant I entered the autumn in fine fettle. My one real scare was towards the end of the summer when literally overnight I started to feel generally unwell, bilious and like I'd been given a dose of IBS just to catch up with the years I've not suffered from it. There was something of a panic. Milk was cut out of my diet and replaced with oat milk - no change. I avoided wheat for three days, no change. We were narrowing down the list of culprits or I was suffering from something else...

The solution has been both one of the easiest things I've done and with terrible consequences. The next thing on my list to avoid was caffeine - I did, after all I drink about 20 mugs of strong coffee a day. Within 48 hours all the ill feelings had dispersed and only returned once, when, after a week of abstinence, I had a cup of coffee and suffered for the next four hours plus. Apart from the god-awful headaches during the first 9 or 10 days, the most difficult part of cutting caffeine out of your diet is what to replace it with. I like coffee, but proper diesel standard coffee. The stronger the better. I now drink about 6 alternative brown beverages a day now. I haven't had a cup of tea since 2001 and have never really fancied going back to it, especially now my sugar intake has halved, so I was faced with doing something I had NEVER done in my entire existence - and I can think of friends who would be horrified at what I'm about to tell you. I started on decaf (which is how I spell it but it has an erroneous F at the end on jars). Jesus on wheels, how do people seriously drink this? It doesn't smell like coffee. It doesn't taste like coffee. It isn't really coffee; you'd probably get as much out of drinking a spoonful of Original Bisto powder, with 1½ sugars and milk. 

Decaf is simply a piss take. It's an affront to the Trades Descriptions Act. Do you know what my wife thought it smelled of when one was thrust under her nose? Watered down warm milk. I can think of many things worse to drink, but it should be called Hot Brown Beverage and not coffee. Maybe 'cophey' would be more appropriate - this product aspires to be something it can't be and is thus just allowed to be a homophone. 

Procrastinate Now!

Seems to have been the motto inside my head, especially since the middle of October when winter started looming on the horizon. To be fair, I haven't been productive at all this year; it has given me license to be a lazy fucker, but my get up and go got up and went at the prospect of a restricted winter and the last couple of months have been something of a blur of time and stuff. I moan a lot again, more than I have for a few years, but I think that's because everybody you're fortunate enough to meet - safely - since March has had one thing or another to moan about. I try to keep mine to the things I'm personally bewildered about rather than any old prospective outrage. I try to rage against our press as much as I can, despite my knowledge of tilting at windmills and in many ways my procrastination from general life has allowed me to burn out my rage at my fellow human beings who either can't, won't or refuse to look at arguments from another perspective.

This largely deals with politics, but the intransigence of people's beliefs has now made the internet it's most nasty since its creation. It seems hate and opposition are the two driving forces behind it; almost like it's been steered into that direction by people with agendas we know not of... I'm addicted to it like most others, but I am growing tired of being asked for my information before I can operate around it like I once did, or worse, to pay for something I once had for free, because someone somewhere managed to think of a way to monetarise something that was initially intended to be one world wide free communications system. People with money don't like free things, especially when they can make money from them. Plus, the internet gives you an excuse to be bored and unproductive.

One of the sidebars of my procrastination has been I've taken up playing on-line golf, mainly because the only games I really enjoyed in the early years of computers were golf simulations. You can just about enjoy it without spending any money and it's replaced the fact that even though I have a golf course within easy walking distance of my front door, I'm unlikely to play a round again - what with my shoulder and back and my popeye arm - it would be a recipe for injury. The game's quite accurate in that if you want to really get good you have to spend shit loads of money on 'virtual' equipment (or in a more accurate term: the more money you spend the less unpredictable the game becomes). 

Home Improvements

Best part of the year has been a clutter thanks to the wife's insistence that she is a reincarnated builder. As a result, one of the rooms had its contents distributed throughout the house, while she and my mate George turned it from a brick outhouse with negligible insulation into a proper bona fide room. In fact, she did such a great job it's arguably the best room in the house now.

The garden still floods. We're torn between growing rice or declaring it Scotland's 30,001st loch. 

I re-felted the shed roof (with help from George). Actually, it was half of the shed roof, but... you know... something.

Music, ennit?

Kairon: IRSE's album Polysomn was rated as the 8th best album in Finland in 2020 (giving rise to the question - what were the top 7 Finnish albums like?). It would have been my favourite album of the year, had it not been for an album released two weeks before Christmas by a Scottish folk band...

Yes, you did indeed read that correctly. Mr Eclectic - man of world music's hidden secrets - has rediscovered folk music and so much so that I listen to it far more than is obviously healthy.

The Laggenberry Man by Beluga Lagoon is an ace album. Beluga Lagoon Films has been an excellent source of celluloid entertainment and Andrew O'Donnell (and his two associates Mark Taylor and Blaine Abercrombie) are extremely talented musicians, travel guides, film makers and really seem like thoroughly decent guys. The stand out track on the new album is 'Sunrise', but 'Sunset' is a close second.

It's Beginning to NOT Look a Lot Like Christmas...

I know a lot of people who 'do' Christmas, the majority of the rest just appreciate it for what it has become, either by taking advantage of the days off or simply to practice their descent into alcoholism, but it seems that in the year of COVID, the shine has gone off of it even before Boris decided to shut the country down again from Boxing Day.

One of the crazy beautiful things about living in Wigtown (the size of a village in the South of England) is how compact and all-encompassing it feels, especially at Christmas. This was our fourth one here and the least Christmassy I can remember it ever being; in fact, with the exception of one or two houses, this was about the most low-key festive period I've ever witnessed. 

Our living room is very festive, but the rest of the house? It could be June if it wasn't so cold.

I've had less contact with people this year than since the late 1990s and those I have interacted with have been singing the same disdainful, angry and frustrated song - it goes something like, 'Isn't 2020 a load of shit and why doesn't anything make sense any more?' I think I wished my first 'Happy Christmas' about a week ago and whenever the subject has been brought up, most people have been moaning about how shit it's going to be unable to share vast quantities of largesse with people they don't communicate with 363 days a year. 

After four and a half years...

Brexit finally appears to be happening. It appears we won't be better off and we've learned that going it alone in a global world makes about as much common sense as running for parliament on a Flat Earth ticket. Oh and let's not talk about sovereignty, eh? The sad thing about it is it's unlikely to trigger mass 'I never voted for this' statements from the great unwashed, therefore the sense of schadenfreude that all us Remoaners have been anticipating isn't likely to happen and for the next few years we'll not see an awful lot different for the vast majority and isolated cases will be dismissed as 'bad losers' first and foremost, even if their story is pertinent.

I expect we'll return to the EU in about 15 years and it will probably be in a deal as close as the one we had when we left. I also expect the EU will have changed considerably by then and will focus on the essentials required for countries to work together. It will spark a rise in UKIP styled movements, but most of the hardened Leavers will be dead or too old or frail to do much but rail against the school leaver charged with wiping their arses.

Obviously the future is one big uncertain blob at the moment, COVID has changed everything, whether we like it or not. Most people don't like change too much, they prefer their dull boring existences because nothing too bad ever happens and we'd like to keep it that way. I just hope that it makes people more thankful for what they have always had and who to blame when they haven't any more.

Snippets

* I successfully grew runner beans this year. After over 20 years of trying, I knocked it out of the park this year!

* However, flooding destroyed 75% of my potato crop; stunted my beetroot, rotted my tomatoes on the vine and the short growing season made our attempts at growing squashes a wee bit fruitless. It's been a fantastic summer for growing, but we started too late.

* I discovered an on-line spice company called Red Rickshaw (well, Jones did, but I've used them now, so...) and they have relieved me of one of my main worries about living in a remote part of Scotland where the words 'curry leaves' are greeted with bemusement.

* If it was possible for us lowly folk to be able to nominate people for some kind of special award (and I'm sure it is), then our friends George and Julie should be given peerages. Talk about pillars of society during this fucked-up year. They have shopped for the vulnerable, run errands, fixed domestic appliances or sorted out problems. They have stepped in to help when others let people down, Julie has worked tirelessly, despite being retired, and simply doesn't know how to say no. George has been up on roofs, inside chimneys, been up to ears in shit just to ensure that his friends and their neighbours have had it easier and cheaper than if they relied on our unreliable handymen. Whenever they've been able they've gone back down south to sort out family problems, all the while ensuring they keep well socially distanced because of their 'home' duties. They are also fantastic friends and we're lucky to live near them.

* Most people I know have lost someone this year, even if it was only by association and not necessarily because of the virus. The problem with this year has it has allowed people to disassociate themselves from people not close by. I knew when I moved here that there would be people who have been constants in my life who I'd never see again and without wishing to sound cold and callous, this year has made it easier to forget some people. For all of its plus points, Facebook, specifically, has allowed us to be distant with people we used to be central. Someone disappears off social media for a few weeks and before you know it they've pretty much disappeared from your immediate life - it's like without a Facebook presence you don't really exist. This happened to a friend of mine, who simply decided that he needed to return to the real world by not going into the virtual one and nearly six months down the line he's happier than he has been for a while and as he said, 'People like you care enough to drop me a line and fortunately I have plenty of friends who do that.' 

This year has brought back that old idea of 'community' and I'm sure that will be monetarised as soon as someone works out how. Wanna help your neighbour? £25. Having an afternoon chat and a cuppa? £5 per hour. Crazy I know, but you'd never have guessed in a million years that our government would have spaffed so much money on giving their mates contracts for materials they had no experience with, so anything is possible. As some people keep saying, 'We're going to end up paying for all of this, one way or another!'

* So on that happy and optimistic note, I really do hope 2021 brings a few things: people starting to believe experts again without thinking everyone has an agenda. Maybe a world where people with agendas stop thinking everyone else has one would be start - altruism does exist, honest. I'd like people to stay safe and remember, everyone everywhere is in the same state as us, economies will always rebuild themselves if there are people to create them. When the world returns to normal, people will still want the things that are no longer there, so they will create them. Yes, it's unfair to all of those people who will lose everything because of this, but shit happens - you've known it all your lives. It's a fact of life - one of the ones that is often neglected to be taught in schools.

Have a better 2021 than you can hope for!