Hac in Anni Ianua

A topsy-turvy New Year for me as I am off on New Year's Eve and at work on New Year's Day: I had a funeral yesterday on what would normally be my day off. That was unusual, too: a graveside ceremony for someone relatively well-known in the community (though not to me directly), assisted by the Council who provided a PA system and music, and with sloe gin to toast the departed. Seeing people line up outside the cemetery (a rather nice spot, our little local godsacre) was very moving and seemed much more pleasing than being at the Crem., or even, dare I say, in church. Today I have largely spent ordering books and managing to avoid employing the Evil Empire of Amazon to do so, and downloading music ranging from the orchestral accompaniment to the Golden Parade of the Pharoahs back in July, to early-1980s feminist punk, to 1940s Chinese jazz. This has a name, shidaiqu, so don't say you don't learn anything here, unless you knew it before.

I get slightly peeved when people I know speak as though calendar years have personalities, and it's both a mystery and a shock when one turns out unusually horrible, but I also get peeved when other people I know get very superior about not doing that. It's a natural if loose way of thinking. The annual ticking-over of one digit to another gives us a way of framing our outlook and perhaps amending our behaviour, though whatever life may presently be throwing at us pays no attention to it, of course. 

People ask me whether I think the pandemic will ever be over and I say, Yes I do, because human beings have been through this experience umpteen times and it has always followed, overall, the same trajectory. Pandemics never end with diseases eradicated: we've only ever managed that twice, with smallpox and one sort of polio. Instead successive waves of infection sweep across continents, or the world, and they get milder as resistance builds up among their survivors. What's different this time is twofold: first, we have far more information than ever before, and can analyse what's happening with the virus in a way we never could in the past, and secondly we are tackling this disease not predominately with natural infection, but with vaccines. We are not just shrugging our shoulders and letting lots of people die. That's a degree of progress.

I think it will all be all right, and it may all be all right sooner than we fear. Not everything will be. Democracy and freedom seem to me very fragile indeed - more fragile than they always are - and of course we're still heading, more likely than not, for the collapse of our civilisation and everything we love and value before the end of the century. You might have noticed this is the warmest New Year on record. That may well not be all right at all. But this will be. In a couple of hours time I will drink a small toast to it!