Things can only get better

It’s be­come some­thing of a tra­di­tion at Cat­alo­nia Today to ded­i­cate a num­ber of pages in the De­cem­ber issue of the mag­a­zine to re­view­ing some of the key events – in var­i­ous walks of life, at home and abroad – that have ap­peared in the news in the pre­vi­ous 12 months. It’s ob­vi­ously an in­com­plete look back at the year be­cause there’s not the space to in­clude every­thing, but I al­ways find it in­ter­est­ing to re­fresh the mem­ory, es­pe­cially in the case of those sto­ries that make me think: “Was that only six months ago? I thought it was more like two years” or “Was that six months ago? I thought it was only two weeks ago.”

Look­ing at this year’s re­view of the year, for ex­am­ple, which be­gins on page 19 (go back and check it out in case you haven’t al­ready), I see that the Cata­lan elec­tion took place in Feb­ru­ary, when I could have sworn it was at the end of the pre­vi­ous year. I’m also re­minded that the Olympics went ahead in Tokyo in the sum­mer, which I’d com­pletely for­got­ten about: for some rea­son, prob­a­bly the lack of crowds, the Games didn’t make the im­pres­sion on me that they usu­ally do.

Then I thought it might be in­ter­est­ing to look back at the re­view from pre­vi­ous is­sues, to see how the sto­ries we high­lighted in the past cou­ple of years have stood the test of time. One thing be­came im­me­di­ately clear to me: there’s no un­der­es­ti­mat­ing the ef­fect of the pan­demic as a turn­ing point in our re­cent his­tory, as many of the sto­ries we fo­cused on have since been over­shad­owed or even made com­pletely ir­rel­e­vant since the onset of Covid-19.

How­ever, I es­pe­cially en­joyed read­ing the col­umn I wrote for the De­cem­ber 2019 issue of the mag­a­zine (no doubt the one and only time that sen­tence has ever been said), which looked on the bright side of the year and con­tem­plated 2020 with an en­thu­si­as­tic sense of op­ti­mism. In other words, while coro­n­avirus was al­ready be­gin­ning to claim its first vic­tims in China in De­cem­ber 2019, I was blithely list­ing many of the good things that had hap­pened dur­ing the pre­vi­ous 12 months and con­cluded, please allow me to quote my­self, “I for one am sure there’ll be plenty more like them in the year to come.”

While there were few among us who fore­saw the im­mi­nent ap­proach of a global pan­demic that would dis­rupt the nor­mal func­tion­ing of so­ci­ety, turn our per­sonal lives up­side down, ham­string the econ­omy, and leave mil­lions dead, just how wrong can you be? Pre­dic­tions, it seems, are not my thing and I think I’d best steer clear of fu­ture an­a­lyt­ics or for­tune telling. From a per­sonal point of view, the most wor­ry­ing thing of all is that I pre­dicted that my foot­ball team, Ever­ton, would have an un­char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally good sea­son. They are cur­rently on a run of five de­feats out of six.

Where I am per­haps on firmer ground – al­though I’ll find out for sure in a cou­ple of years when I look back at this col­umn – is that while things may have been bad this year due to the con­tin­u­ing pan­demic, surely, in the im­mor­tal words of nineties pop group D:ream: things can only get bet­ter.