Introducing our review of the year, by Tim Moore

Without wanting to kick off on a downer – when was the last time anyone gazed back at the year gone by with deep fondness? It’s certainly tough to imagine who might be holding 2023 close to their hearts. The recipient of the world’s first successful eye transplant, maybe, and perhaps David Cameron. Over the last 12 months, it’s been a struggle for the rest of us just to get a solidly OK week under our belts. You think you’re getting there, but then come Friday there’s a train strike, or half of southern Europe burns to the ground, or Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg call off their cage fight. It’s been the sort of year when you couldn’t even rescue a long-lost sheep without someone telling you off for not leaving it where it was.

This was supposed to be the year we finally put the pandemic behind us, notwithstanding the related bills we’ll be paying off until the end of time. But it absolutely wasn’t, what with the Covid inquiry refreshing every horror, and eroding whatever remains of our faith in and respect for the powers that be. At least we only have another two and a half years of public hearings to endure. A few of us might even be around when the inquiry’s final report comes out.

At times in 2023, it has seemed that if the pandemic taught us anything, it’s this: terrible things now happen all the time, and when they do you can’t rely on anyone in charge to sort them out, or even formulate a coherent response. Thirteen years into its Westminster residency, our Government has the air of a bigname supergroup steadily depleted by scandal, decadence and musical differences, now obliged to cobble together its line-up from mystery stand-ins. Is that Esther Mcvey on bongos? Someone needs to tell her they’re upside down. The band can only remember one tune these days, but it’s tough to double down on immigration when your numbers have trebled up.

Where does the buck stop? In 2023 it just kept moving. Half the civil service seems to have known for years that the public buildings this country put up in the postwar decades were largely constructed from porridge and twigs, but the Health and Safety Executive felt it best not to tell affected schools that they were ‘liable to collapse with little or no notice’ until late this August, with the new academic year days away. In an episode that seemed to encapsulate 2023’s zeitgeist of decay and despair, villagers in East Sussex finally had their worst potholes filled in after spray-painting enormous penises around them.

It was a year that saw the pandemic’s clearest lifestyle legacy embedded for good. Very nearly half the UK workforce now spends time ‘teleworking’ from home, a phenomenon that compellingly coincided with the abrupt rise of AI. In January, nobody had heard of CHATGPT and its ilk; come December, we’re being airily informed that AI will put most of us on the dole, and – a bit less airily – that we’ll only know if it’s grown too powerful to contain when it’s too late. Maybe it already is. Who’d be truly flabbergasted to discover that WFH was the first step in AI’S divide-and-conquer masterplan, allowing it to gain surreptitious control of data and communication networks in our deserted offices? Step two: get Trump re-elected, and stand well back.

Things that used to get bad really slowly started getting worse fast this year. The simmering Israel-gaza conflict exploded horrifically, when Hamas terrorists penetrated the border and massacred more than 1,200 people, sparking a full-scale Israeli invasion that left thousands of Palestinians dead. Climate change, by tradition a slow-burner, seemed to hit fast-forward. In July, the average temperature on Earth topped 17C for the first time on record – then set a new peak three times in the next three days. At least we did something: invited a petro-state to host the COP28 climate-change summit, then tutted really quite loudly on hearing claims that it planned to use the event to strike oil and gas deals. At any rate, it was almost a relief when the cold nights drew in after a late-september Indian summer, until you remembered what it costs to heat your home these days. In no small part thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which this year congealed into ghastly dug-in attrition, the Somme with drones.

But even in 2023, a few rays of light made it through to sunny our uplands. It was announced that tigers and blue whales have made a comeback. Elon Musk keeps making a very expensive arse of himself. Penny Mordaunt held up a massive sword for ages. And Shane Mcgowan and Henry Kissinger both left us on the same day, allowing obituarists to celebrate the full majestic scope of human endeavour and endurance on a single page.