The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
2022: excell ent in parts
It was only on 27 January of this year that legally obligatory facemasks disappeared. Since 2022 was to prove memorable for bad news, this piece of good news was carefully stowed in the baskets of anyone harvesting reasons to be cheerful. The year began well, in a fashion. It was nice and warm in London on New Year’s Day, reaching 16.3C in St James’s Park, London. But the shortsleeve weather was a harbinger of a record summer heat in July of 40.3C, at Coningsby, Lincolnshire. It was too much of a good thing, though a long drought was eventually brought to an end after Thames Water, with 15 million customers, declared a hosepipe ban on 24 August; by 6am on 25 August it was raining heavily in the capital.
Some good apples shone out amid a barrel-load of bad. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, not only the defenders, but the watching world was stirred by the steady defiance of President Volodymyr Zelensky. When Boris Johnson, then Prime Minister, travelled to Kyiv in secret in April and joined him for the cameras in the streets, he was given a pottery cock, modelled on a ceramic bird that had become famous for surviving Russian bombardment.
In Russia, Marina Ovsyannikova, a journalist, held up a placard saying ‘No war’ during the television news; she had to flee the country, but she had made her point. In Britain, under a complicated scheme called Homes for Ukraine, more than 66,000 Ukrainian refugees were placed with volunteer families in England and Wales, nearly half of them in rural areas.
Warming moments stood out during the celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee, notably Paddington Bear being shown Her Majesty’s marmalade sandwich in her handbag in a touching, well-acted video. When the worst happened, and the Queen died, on 8 September, the nation was undoubtedly moved, as was demonstrated by the live-stream of an unending queue paying respects at the lying-in-state. But if one sought anything good from the year, this was it, a country happily united in sadness.
Some good news depended on which team you supported. In the US
midterm elections, for example, the Democrats retained control of the Senate, after a long period of vote-counting. Most people, even in France, were glad that Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right Rassemblement National, failed to win the presidential elections against Emmanuel Macron, and that the far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, scourge of the rainforest, also lost out to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil.
In Britain, some rejoiced in March when the Standards Commissioner prohibited John Bercow, the former Speaker, from ever again obtaining a security pass to Parliament. For the keenest observers of politics there was plenty that would have strained credulity in a novel, such as the brief premiership of Liz Truss; voters may have been periodically baffled, but it was good to see the mechanism of government keep turning.
Those who like a quiet life greeted with quiet satisfaction a change in the law that allowed police to seize the sound equipment of the Stop Brexit Man, Steve Bray, familiar for his loud protests outside Parliament.
For the first time since 1991, tickets for the Wimbledon women’s singles final cost the same as the men’s. Supporters of Ons Jabeur, seeing her defeated this year by Elena Rybakina in three sets in 1hr 47min, could console themselves by thinking: ‘Well, at least I paid £240, the same as if I wanted to see three hours of Novak Djokovic beating Nick Kyrgios in four sets.’ The men’s champion got £2 million, as did the women’s – or the ladies’ champion, in the language of the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club.
For sporting value, though, no one could beat Jacky Hunt-broersma, aged 46, from Arizona, who ran 104 marathons in 104 days. She has one leg. Her lower left leg is supplied with one of those bendy blades. One day she ran two half-marathons and then thought that perhaps they didn’t count, so she went out and ran a full one before midnight.
To put us dull terrestrial creatures in our place, in February came news of the longest single lightning bolt recorded, flashing across Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, a span of 477 miles, roughly the same distance as from
London to Hamburg. It was a cloud-to-cloud affair, so no one was struck, except by the scale of it all.
In North America, time-honoured rescues marked the seasons. In the spring 18 anglers were rescued after becoming stranded on an ice floe in Lake Erie. In the autumn 200 people were rescued as they floated on a large chunk of ice that broke away in Upper Red Lake, Minnesota. In warmer climes, shipping organisations said that from the start of 2023 the Indian Ocean would no longer be considered at high risk from Somali pirates.
If there were prizes for being surprised, one would have gone to Haisam Nassir, 25, a mother of four from Dagenham, who one breakfast-time found a pound bag of crystal meth in a packet of Golden Morn cereal; no harm befell anyone. A curious change in the law raised the legal age of marriage in England and Wales to 18; there was no dancing in the street but supporters were convinced it would increase the store of human happiness.
Among gestures that could only be admired for their ambition, Turkey told the world to call it Türkiye; on the whole it didn’t. The World Health Organization said that monkeypox would now be known as mpox, as groovy a name as any rapper’s.
In bear news, things were on the up for the brown variety (Ursus arctos) in the Pyrenees, whose numbers were the highest for a century. There are about 70, half-and-half male and female with four not identified as either, perhaps preferring not to specify on the official form. On the eastern slopes of the Ecuadorian Andes, six new species of rain frog were identified. In Australia, white ibises were found to have discovered how to eat toxic cane toads by washing them first.
Listeners to The Archers celebrated the career of June Spencer, who retired at the age of 103 from playing Peggy Woolley. On 22 November, the feast of St Cecilia the patroness of music, as days of heavy rain rolled by, Thames Water lifted its hosepipe ban, and the nation sang a soggy Te Deum of thanks.