What a great year 2016 was. It was a tremendous year, full of hope. Honestly, this year made me glad to be alive. Landmark. Vintage. I for one will look back on 2016 with fondness. It was a Good Year. That would be my “hot take” if I could ever use that phrase with any conviction, but I can’t because I always visualise someone lobbing me a baked potato.
I know, the liberal consensus is that 2016 was a total shitastrophe. A year somehow jinxed by karmic voodoo, despite the contradictory liberal consensus that no supernatural agency must ever be acknowledged, as in Black Mirror. And now there’s a rush to get it over with, to bosh the Christmas tree up and then down again, quick Auld Lang Syne, new calendar, fresh start.
Yes, I agree. 2016 was a chronicle of fear and misery, a saga of hate and tragedy. Full and empty at the same time. Our world felt fragile, doomed, a paper lantern sent aloft in flames to perish in the wind. Brexit & Trump, which should have been a Soho bruncherie for wankers, turned out to be a political victory for wankers instead. Comrades, I too cried listening to Bowie songs and Prince mixes. I too speed-mourned everyone (bye Diski, bye Shandling, bye Wood, bye Zaha, bye Cohen, bye bye everybody) just managing, along with the rest of the world, to reconfigure my disbelief in time for the next mortal blow.
Yeah, death’s been relentless this year. With one quite important exception. For me, anyway. Because 10 years ago, in answer to the obvious question, the oncologist told me flatly and honestly: “Between three months and 10 years”. And in a flash, in that negative Kodak moment, my life was instantly recalibrated. Worst case scenario: dead by Christmas 2006. Best case scenario: still alive in 2016.
I was 53. My cancer had been sudden and aggressive. To complicate matters, it then triggered mass hysteria among my antibodies. Rather than address the tumour, the useless panicking minion antibody dickheads went nuts and started eating my nervous system, creating genuinely impressive levels of pain and putting me in a wheelchair. 2006 was rubbish. Although to take a balanced view, I’m sure in the world outside Lancaster Royal Infirmary people were clinking glasses, laughing like donkeys and agreeing that 2006 was a really bloody tremendous year.
At that point though, blitzed on morphine, a whole decade of borrowed time seemed a preposterous stretch of life. I could barely see past breakfast. To misquote millionaire art provider Damien Hirst, I experienced the physical impossibility of life in the mind of someone dying. How impossibly glamorous and futuristic “2016” sounded. Not that I was going to be around, probably, but imagine what humanity would achieve in a decade. A cure for cancer, obviously, that’s basic. How difficult could it be? Cancer is essentially a script error. Surely by 2016 there would be some sort of genomic cellular reboot serum that just, you know, restored your factory settings or whatever? Alas, no. A code-correcting cancer jab remains on the world’s to-do list, along with sky trams and a Smiths reunion.
But here I am, against the odds, with no indication that I’m going anywhere soon and I’ll tell you what, it’s just the strangest thing to contemplate an entire bonus decade. To look back through a weird four-dimensional kaleidoscope and try to imagine all that time unlived. To imagine not having been here. The grandchildren unknown. The gigs untaken, the people unmet, the crap telly unwatched with my missus. I suppose in a parallel universe I’m not here with this sunset, or this armagnac. I mean, I know we all wonder at the world continuing without us when we die, but I’m pretty much permanently amazed at it continuing while I live. Oh, I’ve collected a few more biological failures on the way. My lungs are now reduced to those birthday balloons you find under the sofa months later. My pillboxes sound like maracas. Yet here I am still, dazzled and grateful, with occasional existential flashes of being a supernatural presence in my own life. Ghost Grandpa, ghostwriting this. I no longer try to guess how long I’ve got. And I like living with this vagueness. “Vague” and “hopeful” sort of go together, somehow.
As strange as it was in 2006 to imagine what this “best scenario – 2016” might look like, I’ve tried looking the other way. Bloody hell, the world as it was 10 years ago is very much a foreign country. Tony Blair was still prime minister. Remember him? Trim guy, tanned, guilty face stretched over his skull, as if by trampoline springs? Tory leader: David Cameron. Remember him? Flushed, succulent, permanent look of bafflement as if someone had just asked him for some “spare change”. Menzies Campbell was the new leader of the Lib Dems. Remember him? Only joking.
The UK economy then was purring like a milkman’s cat. We were all like, come on, that whole boom and bust thing’s as dead as new jack swing, mate. Come on, it’s the 80s all over again but this time it’ll never stop, sustainable growth mate, don’t worry, the poor will catch up eventually. Come on, take a chill pill, Labour are in charge, how bad can it be, look at us all, we’re adorable and hilarious, having it large with our sex and drugs and Sugababes, out of the way, we’re gonna do a massive conga in the Titanic ballroom! And then the light started to fade as we headed at full speed into the silent foggy ice banks of Newfoundland.
It really was a golden summer in 2006 though, one of those mythical summers people like to remember happening before catastrophes. July had a recordbreaking heatwave. Memorable month for me too, as it turned out. My antigen numbers had come in, spectacularly high. But an inflexible NHS system had already decided there was no way they could bring forward the biopsy, set for three months’ time. A neat solution as by then I’d be, if not dead, unsaveable. So in July 2006, for the first and only time in my life, and following the clever advice of Barbara on reception at my GP’s surgery, I paid for a private consultation with my NHS oncologist, at the local private hospital where he worked part-time. He was then able to pick up the phone from his private consultant’s office and book me an NHS biopsy, with the public sector version of him, in two days’ time. Then at that biopsy his NHS persona acknowledged the seriousness of the situation flagged up by his private sector self and thankfully “they” immediately started me on the treatment that’s kept me alive ever since.
This blurring of who does what in the NHS – this is how the lung-shadow of privatisation has spread in the last 10 years. Lobbyists and politicians push for lucrative contracting-out for companies and their shareholders but call it improved customer service, and savings. Those of us in the #WeLoveTheNHS club are forced to circle the wagons, when it clearly needs not brittle defence but proper reform. And those of us born in the infancy of the NHS, who have paid in their whole lives for the treatment they receive, now discover they’re part of an “overspend”. Before the Tory cuts – £20bn so far and another £22bn by 2020 – the NHS was “in surplus”. Why in the name of Beveridge’s bollocks are we even talking about overspending and not underfunding? Because we’re idiots, that’s why.
And in the near future we will bugger an ankle or a hip and we will have been waiting for an X-ray result for 10 days, and we will concede that in the scheme of things it’s not a priority, the NHS is stretched, even though the hospital is tantalisingly only 300 yards from the doctor’s. And we will ring up again and a customer service representative will ask us if we’ve considered a free trial of NHS Prime, which would definitely get us the result by teatime. And we will say yes, and it’ll be game, set and match to Richard Branson, who’s larking about for the photographers in his white coat and stethoscope, chucking a hapless intern dressed as a Carry On nurse into his fucking swimming pool.
Talking of viral narcissists, I’ll tell you what else happened in 2006: Twitter was launched. Admittedly it would be a while before it metastasised into the shrieking game of off-ground touch we know today. Who then could have foreseen the baleful effect of social media on the very notion of “truth”? A decade ago it was possible, just, to remember a world without the internet. Now it is difficult even to remember a time before Facebook. Nobody could have predicted that social media would occupy the cockpit of online journalism and then force it into a Germanwings descent. Now we scroll on our “devices” through the news wreckage, an aggregated jumble of Yesterday On Twitter, desperately searching for signs of surviving listicled paptent, discovering whose turn it is today to be shamed into an apology and resignation.
Even the “real news” this year hasn’t made much sense. I too watched speechless as Brexit unfolded. A Whitehall farce, with Cameron and Johnson and Gove in and out of the wardrobe, their trousers round their ankles, union jack underwear barely containing their political ambitions. I gasped too as the tumbling tragi-comedy turned to cartoon horror and suddenly the prime minister was a Matt Groening sketch of Mr Burns’ evil niece. We all wondered where furtive leader of the opposition Jack Hargreaves had disappeared to. We held our breath as, tiptoe-quiet, BBC’s Autumnwatch tracked him to a bramblecovered allotment shed in north London where, God bless him, he was quietly sharing gardening tips on Mumsnet.
But however much I railed against this weird world, where post-truth politics was primped and fluffed by post-truth tabloids, at least I was still here to complain. I was glad to be alive to watch England turn into some grim am-dram production of The Crucible. And look, I know everyone under 30 assumes all old people are paranoid racists (sorry “nillennials”, generational stereotyping is a twoway street) but for a lot of boomers Brexit Britain wasn’t just scary, it was baffling. I can’t have been the only old git to have been completely thrown by the anti-Polish stuff, for instance. As schoolchildren in the 50s we were taught about the bravery of the Polish people. Murdered by Nazis. Fighting alongside us in the Battle of Britain. Our staunchest, bravest allies. Now Polish people were being beaten up by English kids? Were English kids now the Nazis? None of it made any sense, which was good news for the internet because internet “news” is whatever its brainless oxen algorithms say it is. As I write this, there is a “news feed” on my laptop and into the feeding trough has been tipped a story on the repeat bombing of two hospitals in Aleppo followed by another on the eyebrow-grooming industry.
2016 seemed to be half the time about small stuff – little celebrity spirals of “virtue signalling” and “self-care” and “identity politics”– and half the time about massive stuff, like entire continents sloughing off the skin of liberal democracy. And is something happening at a supra-biological level? Every referendum and election since the Scottish IndyRef seems to result in a more or less even 50-50 split. Perhaps there’s some continuous next-level humanity cell division under way. It’s easy to see how a devolved England could split into Greater London and The Rest. Then, the chaff disarded as usual, London would split into north and south, then east and west, then into smaller and smaller bubbles until London’s just a vast, unfathomable sociological froth. Oh God, has it happened already?
I know things went dark and darker for a lot of people this year and I hesitate to strike a note of optimism because being alive is a privilege and believe me I have checked and double-checked it. But come on. Still here after living a bonus decade. Surely that confers some sort of temporary suspension of the trembling, fist-clenching “you need to” and “you don’t get to” bullshit we are obliged to observe these days. So let’s have a knees-up, see 2016 out with love in our hearts. And if we’re here the same time next year, well. What a tremendous privilege that will be. Here’s to 2017.
Epilogue: friendly distant cousins
There’s a story from 10 years ago I’d like to share. Because it shows – I think – that as long as we hold on to our humanity, miracles can happen. After the clumsy melodrama of cancer, my frankly improbable Act Two was unfolding in a neurology ward, where I’d been diagnosed with Guillain-Barré Syndrome. My twattish immune system was destroying my gormless nervous system. Legs gone, shuffling around on a Zimmer frame. Astonished to hear the consultant on his ward round tell a posse of student doctors that I would never walk again. Still in shock when a junior doctor called Chris Murphy came back a little later and told me they would offer me something called IVIG – intravenous immunoglobulin.
It was a last throw and they wouldn’t be that enthusiastic. It probably wouldn’t work. Also, it cost six grand a bag and I’d need one a day for at least a week. Anyway, he urged me to take it. So I did. And 10 days after starting the treatment – exactly like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill – I could wiggle a toe, then lift a foot an inch off the bed, then walk with sticks, then walk out of hospital. But here’s the thing. Nobody seems to know how IVIG works. It’s just a gloop of humanity, each bag containing the plasma of thousands of donors from all over the world. What doctors think might happen is that somewhere in this human plasmic squidge there may be one or two sets of antibodies just like yours.
Friendly distant cousins. And they put their arms around your wayward, thick-as-shit antibodies and love them. Counsel them. These total strangers’ antibodies, from who knows where, say to your dickhead antibodies: “Mate, seriously. Stop chewing those nerves. I know you’re angry but honestly, it’s not helping. There’s actual cancer due south of here, let’s have a go at that instead. Come on, take my hand …” And so your stupid antibodies finally leave your nerves alone, thanks to the incredible generosity of an anonymous donor in Sri Lanka or Russia or Italy or Nigeria. Miracles are marvellous things that can’t be explained. And if that’s not a miracle I don’t know what is. We are all marvellous, really.
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