The Year In View

There's an extremely powerful impulse to generalise about our experiences, a desire to find commonalities. This is not a bad thing; it helps bond a community. But it's important to be aware of the potential falseness of the generalising given the complexity of our highly individual experiences in a richly complex world. The unending stream at this point in time of reviews of the year can become tiresome in their underlying insistence that things were the same for everyone.

This is particularly true in relation to the idea that 2020 was an awful year because of the pandemic. Yes, it was, if you were one of those who suffered as a result. But I know quite a few people who positively enjoyed the lockdown here. One colleague told me he loved the whole thing as it allowed him to relax with a depth normally denied. I'd have to admit myself to generally enjoying the year, not the least for the break in routine. Work suddenly felt fresh because it was so different. Being denied the pleasures of going out added considerably to the enjoyment of those pleasures when things got back to something like normal.

In some ways I feel bad about feeling good about a year that for many has been so bad. But that's the way of things. I've seen one or two documentaries recently that have made out the years of Thatcher in the UK as being pretty awful for most folks where I lived and worked, and they were, and I detested the woman. But I look back on great times from a personal point of view. I suppose it's a bit like salvaging something from the wreckage.