TWENTY – TWENTY VISION – A YEAR IN REVIEW – Daniel Bran Griffith

There is a certain clarity when looking at the current situation and the pestilence that inflicts us today. For although the year 2020 started off with such great promise, for many it has turned rather sour. We could suggest that our 2020 vision (sorry) failed but that is untrue. Behind the fog, the mist and the mirrors of illusion, we can see our society in its true colours. Selfish, egocentric and fragile. Although we have witnessed manifestations of community spirit, support and goodwill, these are atypical and far from the norm. The great gestures that we have witnessed stand in stark contrast to the normality of our Western World.

I have heard it said that 2020 has been the worst year ever but that simply is not true. What they really mean is that is has been the worst year in their experience. Perhaps even the worst year in living memory for many but even this can be questioned. Human civilisation has experienced worse years. The years of the Bronze Age collapse (1200 – 1150BC) and the year they burnt the Library of Alexandria (48BC during the Roman Civil War) were all quite horrible for those involved. Then we have the start of the Barbarian incursions of the fifth and sixth centuries. It was not pleasant to be on the receiving end of them or the later Viking raids. The years of the Civil Wars in Britain and in America, can hardly be seen as anything other than great social disasters. More recently we may wish to consider the Great War, World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Those are of course all conflicts and periods covering more than one year.

If we wish to focus purely on single calendar years, rather than a period of years; we can nominate 1347. That year the Black Death entered Europe and the year itself is now called the year of the Great Pestilence. The Black Death is a disease that would return to haunt Western civilisation many times and killed millions across Europe. Plague would return to Britain’s capital and many other countries in 1665. If one is Native American or First Nations if you prefer, there are particular years that cannot be forgotten. The indigenous populations lost more people to famine and European diseases, than they ever did to war.

Nearer to our time then surely 1916 and 1917 require a special mention. The first year saw the Battle of the Somme and the second the highest number of causalities of the Great War. If you are Australian, then 1917 is remembered as the worst year of the country’s history. It was that awful year of social upheaval, strikes and the peak of war causalities. Some suggest that 1917 was so influential upon the Australian consciousness; that it helped to create their distinct national identity. If you are French or British, then 1940 can be seen as the darkest of times. If you are Russian or American however, then 1941 is perhaps the worst year of all time. If German or Japanese, it is without doubt 1945.

Somewhere in this catalogue of disasters, the majority manmade and conflict related, sits the natural and the economic. I mention the Black Death of 1347 and the diseases introduced to the Americas. Both of these events would have detrimental economic influences. October 1929 saw the Wall Street Crash that would lead to the Great Depression. A worldwide economic catastrophe that brought immense suffering, to a world still struggling with the after effects of the Great War itself. The year of 1930, the year after the Crash; is not remembered fondly. When speaking of the Wall Street Crash many will say; ‘New York sneezed, London caught a cold and Germany almost died.’ It is a very well known quote. It is itself a paraphrase of an earlier one that has been adapted many times since. Most recently in relation to the COVID pandemic as; ‘China sneezed and the World caught a cold.’ We see here Global influences spreading like ripples on a pond.

The Spanish or more appropriately named the Kentucky Flu of 1918, is perhaps the most studied pandemic of recent times. Yet even this most infamous of diseases did not confine its active period to just one year. Most of the events I have catalogued so far may have begun in one year, perhaps reached a peak in one year but their influence has been lasting. We have as part of our human consciousness, this ability or need to think in clear cut partitioned sections.

The year 2020 will quite rightly be remembered as a truly awful year but the pandemic is not over. Before Christmas of 2020 I was able to write that as things stand, 2021 is going to be a lesser 2020. COVID will not and indeed it did not magically disappear at midnight on the 31st of December. No, it will linger like an unwelcome guest. Despite our efforts to ignore it and our hoping that it will just go away, our unwelcome guest will be with us far longer than we have anticipated.

Although we can appreciate that for many 2020 is the worst year ever experienced. When compared to the vast historical record, it is just one in a long list of human catastrophes. The important point is to recognise the human element and not allow that personal experience to be lost amongst the global implications. If you have suffered from the virus, lost loved ones to the virus, experienced the emotional vacuum of social isolation, lost your job or business. Then absolutely and without any reservation, we can say 2020 is the worst year you have ever personally experienced.

With all this in mind, perhaps it is better we search for something positive to say about the year 2020. That is however, challenging and very much dependent upon one’s personal outlook. For example, here in the United Kingdom the year 2019 had ended with a yet another tiresome General Election. If you are on the political Right, then the victory of the Conservative and Unionist Party was a cause for celebration. If your political persuasion if Left wing, it is possible that not waking up to find yourself living in a Communist Republic was something of a disappointment. You can’t please everyone. In January 2020 the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland officially left the European Union, although it would take the remainder of the year for Britain to extricate itself further. Again if you were a Leave voter, this was a cause for celebration, if you voted Remain however, you may well have been in tears. Once again, you can’t please everyone.

The Lockdown or perhaps Lockdowns have left many of us in Tiers (sorry). The social isolation, financial loss and the personal suffering I refer to above. The Internet has become increasingly important to many subject to this isolation. This has had a detrimental effect upon mental health, as every minor issue becomes magnified on the World Wide Web. Issues of a political and environmental nature have also been exaggerated and exploited by those who have access to Social Media. We have seen an increasing amount of what we used to call ‘jumping on the bandwagon’ but today is called virtue signalling. The riots faraway in the United States of America and a death no matter how tragic, are not of direct import to us here in England. Yet both have been used for political gain by extremists on the Left and on the Right. It is a truly distasteful state of affairs, when violence and a death is used to further political ambition.

It is not first time that what we can call foreign problems, have been imported from across the Atlantic obviously. We have seen this rather strange American habit of taking the knee transfer to us recently. A rather nonsensical custom that doesn’t belong here. I am an Englishman. I kneel only to Royalty or when proposing marriage, while our War Dead receive my most solemn bow. Englishmen do not kneel habitually and I have my self respect. Strange turns of phrase and terminology have over the years spread across the world. The social influence of television, films and now the ‘Web’ is quite insidious. Much of this has little meaning or relevance to me. In the USA for example, the colloquial use of ‘defund,’ has a very different meaning to that found in any English dictionary. There are of course many other examples. Based on observation; Mansplain is a sexist term used by women to shut down a conversation with a man, when they disagree with his opinion. Woke is another. This is something that I do in the morning. The alarm went off and I then woke up. I am not woke in the new fashionable sense but I am now awake. I am a middle-aged Englishman and I rarely use colloquialisms, British or American. I find those listed above quite ridiculous.

So what can we take away from 2020 that is positive? Once again that is very much a personal matter. I pay little attention to the global situation, as I prefer to focus on that within the United Kingdom. The current Worldwide emergency hangs over us all and it cannot be ignored, yet here within the United Kingdom there may be some hope. At the beginning of the pandemic estimates for the national death toll varied somewhat, as the information we had was often imprecise. An end of year death toll of half million was once considered the official expectation. The worst case scenario that I estimated and based on the information then available, was a million dead by the end of 2020. As the year progressed the mortality rate remained below expectations, clearly something worked but whatever that was is difficult to say. Even in the Autumn of 2020 I still expected the end of year tally to be one hundred and fifty thousand. Now at the end of the year the official figure is seventy five thousand dead. Well below any of the revised predictions. That surely is a positive?

On a more personal note, I have been published in magazines and in an another anthology. This personal achievement pleases me greatly and I am proud to see my name in print again. Links to blogs relating to Greenmantle Samhain 2020, Pagan Dawn No. 214 – Imbolc 2020 and PILLARS Vol.2, Issue.2 – ‘Seeds of Ares’ can be found below.

The two blogs continue to do quite well, although their reach is rather erratic. My attempts to withdraw from the toxicity of Facebook and reduce my activity, has had a detrimental effect upon my reader figures (or ‘hits’ if you prefer). This has necessitated my return to that awful platform, recognising that medium is how most people choose to access blogs such as my own.

Towards the end of 2020 I changed the focus of my WordPress blog quite deliberately and temporarily. I shamelessly gathered together cartoons and jokes for a series of posts called Funnies. There is nothing of any high quality here, some of the posts are not so much humorous but rather satirical. Not all of the posts are to my taste, as I dislike swearing and uncouth vocabulary. The object of the Funnies series is to amuse, to raise a smile. My thinking being that as the end of the awful 2020 approached, my readers should enter 2021 with a smile.

Usually I would tally up my blog statistics in the spring, the anniversary of my blog on Google (link below). Now that I have two blogs running concurrently, it has become desirable to carry out an end of year tally. This is however, quite satisfactory. My end of year tally for my Google blog is twenty thousand readers while the WordPress blog (this one), has received five thousand ‘hits’ or whatever they are called. This is far from being big league but I consider it to be quite pleasing.

Besides the writing and the blogging, my other hobby is photography. This has taken a step backwards. I cannot have people visit me for portraiture and I have therefore, focused on landscapes. I managed only three out of doors portrait shoots in 2020 and this was in the latter part of the year, once the Lockdown restrictions were eased somewhat.

I applied for several jobs in the latter half of 2020 and having the pick of more than one, chose to retrain in Endoscopy. After almost twenty five years on the wards and with almost twenty of those spent in orthopaedics, this is a big and quite a nerve racking jump. It is a New Year and a new start. I am moving far outside of my comfort zone, to face a fresh challenge.

So we are all left with the same question. What have we learnt from 2020 and what will 2021 bring? The first part of that question in my opinion, is primarily a matter of uncertainty. We have all learnt a very hard lesson. That very little in life is certain or predictable. There are few things that are constant and few things that can be relied upon. Our only certainty is uncertainty itself. Unfortunately with a Lockdown reintroduced over the New Year, it is clear that 2021 will be another year of uncertainty. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, faint perhaps but still blinking hopefully. As we leave the horror of 2020 behind we can hope that 2021 will be a better year, it can hardly be a worse one. We can hope, we can pray and we should as a society pull together to make it so.