| Welcome to 2010 |
| Pix's Column | |||
| Sunday, 03 January 2010 17:29 | |||
2009 was a year to remember. But what the hell actually happened? Here's a handy reminder.HELLO and welcome to 2010. It's great, isn't it? I'm currently flying around in my hovercar, munching on a couple of food pills and writing this via a special helmet which converts my brainwaves into text. I can't stay long, I've got to teleport to Mars at 7pm to watch the final of the Robogames. So here's a hasty retrospective guide to 2009, to help anybody who spent the year in an underground tunnel (I'm looking at you, Osama) from fathoming out precisely how we arrived at this joyous utopia. The tenth year of the new millennium will be remembered as the year in which every British taxpayer found out they had contributed 0.000001p towards Jacqui Smith's husband's pornography bill. The press feigned moral outrage as a cover story for being able to point at someone and shout: "Nur nur you watched porn", and then it turned out that everyone was at the expenses jar. Poor bloke. He's a chump, not a pariah. In a parallel universe all he had to do was pull his pants up and hastily apologise to his wife. In ours, he inadvertently brought about the complete collapse of faith in the entire British political system. He should have married Caroline Flint. She's quite hot for an MP. "It emerged that the Swine Flu pandemic wasn't so much 28 Days Later as 5 Days off Work"Still, that indiscretion paled into insignificance when it turned out that other politicians were spending thousands on seal meat, ivory hats and gold castles for their pet geese. I wish I could muster some kind of anger over it, but considering the total bill is probably less than the price of a tank, it all seemed like an excuse to say "OMG David Cameron eats spaghetti hoops" or sling mud at any political figure you've hated for years. There's one key reason MPs' expenses were such big news, and that's that everybody was utterly sick of hearing about, reading about, writing about and reporting on Swine Flu. The national media loves a good virus, and was clearly smarting that the world's human population had stubbornly refused to die of SARS and Bird Flu, so breath was held for the outbreak of an apocalyptic pork plague. Things began to look damp and squibbish as it emerged that the Swine Flu pandemic wasn't so much 28 Days Later as 5 Days off Work, so when Jacqui's gent tuned to hotel channel 314, it was as great a relief for the rest of us as it presumably was for him. If Swine Flu spectacularly failed to bring about the end of the world, at least the economy was doing its bit. 2009 was the year in which the credit crunch was upgraded (or downgraded, depending on your perspective) to an actual recession. Workplaces across the land suddenly got a whole lot more depressing or vanished entirely and the public sector, which will be spending less in 2011 than Mr Smith spent on Latitia Goes to Latvia, started getting sweaty palms. If there's one upside to the fact that everything's gone wrong, it's that the expectations of the typical British whinger will be cut down to size. These are the kind of people who see a teenager kicking a tulip and think it would never have happened if we hadn't joined the EU. Bus late? Bin full? Dog poo on the pavement? Write a furious letter to the council. You pay your taxes, after all - by all rights the mayor should come round and wipe your bum. Then again, they'd probably just put the loo roll on expenses. I may be wrong in thinking that there's a breed of person who spots a pothole in the road and immediately starts frothing at the mouth about immigration - although I'm sure I spotted one on Question Time - but I sincerely hope there is, because the thought of them spasming with rage at train cuts, tax hikes and NHS waiting lists is the only thing which will keep me cheerful as the country plummets into a public sector dark age. Speaking of healthcare, 2009 was also the year in which the King of Pop formally left the building, and his private medical consumption - which by all accounts could treat a Russian battalion and give them a fantastic party afterwards - became public knowledge. I remember thinking, about ten years ago, that one of the fascinating joys the future held was the chance to see Michael Jackson grow old. Just how, I wondered, would a man who was so famous, so rich, so untouchable and yet manifestly madder than Nick Griffin at a Kabaddi tournament, be treated by the passage of time? Boy did he deliver. We all thought the surgery was weird until Martin Bashir started poking around in all Jacko's life details, and the following decades featured more ups and downs than a Neverland rollercoaster. For all its tragedy, his passing did refocus attention on the man's music, reminding many detractors of just why he became a star. Like Elvis, he seemed not quite of this Earth. So, that's 2009 in a tremendously skewed, horrifically blinkered nutshell. Obviously quite a lot of other things happened, but quite frankly they are all so last year. Now if you'll excuse me, Mars beckons.
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Hoofy makes this comment
Mon 04 Jan 2010 01:37:13 CST