When computers compress data to save on space they use mathematical formula that can return those long chains of 1s and 0s back to their original state, or degrade them to a close approximation. Our brains often take a bolder path to storing the data we take in each day, they just delete as much as they can get away with so that consciousness retains a narrative strand with us at the centre and not a disjointed set of fragments that are alien to us and ultimately maddening. We recall hearing a Taylor Swift song for the first time and whether we like/dislike it....but not the smooth texture of the handrail of the third stairwell in the train station, which pocket we placed our house keys or the phone number of the person we only pretended we'd call back.
Add to this hero's journey we pile on the external stimuli - other people, all 8 billion of them with their presentations of their narratives. There's going to be a lot of deleting going on as our brains sift our signals from their noise. We aid each other to speed along the editing process. I am happy. I am sad. Often we need more. I am sad because a stranger could make you sad so I want to make me and you happy. The stranger is a bad person. The stranger must stop listening to their narrative and start listening to mine.
Time passes. Indexes are re-indexed. We eat, we sleep, we love, we hate. We stand waiting for public transport to take us home, late from a meeting to discuss something abstract that was both too important to miss and irrelevant too. We borrow, we buy. People live, people die. We breath in, we breath out. We stand on a beach, our toes enveloped in surf as gentle waves lap against the shore. The climate is failing, the news report relays. We catch dolphins off our bow and trail them across the bay. Meetings. Deadlines. Reports. Successes. Failures. France is at war. We sit halfway up a mountain in a sea of trees looking out across a valley, they Pyrenees lie beyond hazy in the distance. There is a stillness that we won't be able to recapture for the rest of the year.
Another year has passed. Summarise it. Draw from the index, represent the past. Change the story. Make it suit the narrative. It's all noise. There is no signal. Keep it light.
"Je Suis Charlie Hebdo" we all write on Facebook. It's January 2015. TV is just wall to wall dieting and healthy living shows so we reluctantly watch the news. A small group of terrorists machine gun the editorial team of a satirical magazine in Paris as a reprisal for featuring Allah in a cartoon. There are marches. People on mass declare they are not scared, mostly on social media. Asteroid 2004 BL86 flies by at 3 times the distance from us as the moon. It'll be the closest fly by until 7 August 2027. Syriza sweep to power in the latest round of Greek elections promising to roll back austerity and renegotiate the national debt. The ebola outbreak in West Africa continues to be contained by a mixture of local and international efforts with an efficiency that soon takes it off the news agenda, unless the odd white person briefly contracts it.
We suffered what was then in February the novelty of a maritime tragedy as hundreds of migrants are suspected of dying in the Mediterranean in an attempt to cross over from Libya to Italy. They were definitely migrants. The argument over them being refugees was months away. What was causing people to leave Eritrea on mass and risk their very lives to escape would be something we just wouldn't get around to chatting over in 2015. Rita Ora, Charlie XCX and James Corden needed their airtime too you know. A ceasefire in Ukraine was agreed. Not with Russia of course, they had no involvement in he destabilising of a whole country because it democratically started looking to the West. As a polar vortex fell over America temperatures collapsed. Niagara Falls froze over.
In March in the UK the pre-election budget favoured the old over the young, throwing a bone to savers and promises of changes to inheritance tax in the future. No one said the Conservative Party didn't understand it's voter demographic. Those studying the figures a little deeper see a pattern of Government spending that can only balance the books through significant welfare cuts. An election, a new budget, a revolt in the Lords, these are all for later. For now it's smiling politicians, promises and little talk of tomorrow's "difficult decisions". Meanwhile in a hotel in North Yorkshire, Jeremy Clarkson pauses from denying climate change to strike a producer in the face over the lack of hot food and give exasperated BBC bosses enough of an excuse to take Top Gear off the air. In 2016 the programme will return but with new hosts. Clarkson et al suffered the indignity of not getting their BBC contacts renewed by signing for Amazon at massively inflated salaries. Good to see money putting 1950s racism in its place.
On 23 March an Airbus 320 slowly descended from its cruising height, the co-pilot at the controls steadily and quietly breathed as he adjusted the autopilot. Within minutes the plane had crashed into the side of a mountain in the Alps. The flight recording not only recorded the calmly deliberate actions of the co-pilot but those of the pilot's desperate attempts to regain access to the cockpit, smashing a fire extinguisher against the locked door to a backdrop of the passenger's screams. Everybody died, including the suicidal co-pilot. As soon as mental health issues were suspected and no link to ISIS had been established the media moved on before the debris had been removed from the scree slopes.
April sees another 700 migrants feared dead in a Mediterranean shipwreck. UKIP's Nigel Farage speaks at Strasbourg of the dangers of waves of millions of immigrants coming from Africa and within their contingent half a million Islamic extremists arriving in Europe posing a direct threat to its civilisation. To bring April to a close, at a depth of just over 8 km below Nepal an earthquake of 7.8 strikes taking close to 9000 lives.
May starts with Mayweather beating Pacquiao in a boxing contest more about over hyped promotion and revenue streams than the event itself, something lacking in quality, arriving many years later than it should have taken place when the fighters were at their peaks. It would be a month of gladiatorial contests in the UK with the General Election. Taking the boxing's lead it also resulted in a lack of spectacle, smatterings of disappointment and limited appetite for a rematch. May is the month of the "Shy Tories". A species of voter unable to reveal their true intentions of pollsters. Minor percentage point shifts cause the end of many politicians careers. Meanwhile, David Cameron untroubled over whether to appear smug formed the first Conservative government to rule the country for 18 years. Multinationals, non-doms and most of the print media held their equivalents of street parties. Hard working Britons look to keep their heads down before being invoked in rhetoric in around 5 years. France forces supermarkets to give unsold food to charities. UK equivalents consider doing likewise. On the 23rd Ireland becomes the first country to legalise same sex marriage, a move that gets repeated in other countries in the coming months.
FIFA officials are arrested on corruption charges in Switzerland. The naive/hopeful amongst us see this as the beginning of the end for Sepp Blatter and his FIFA cabal. If this is the case then it's a long goodbye. He finishes 2015 suspended from FIFA and many of his colleagues facing legal charges. His head remains not a pike. The world cup tournaments to Russia and Qatar remain as dubiously awarded. FIFA looks to carry on. Football for all its multimillion pound television deals and media saturation suffers.
June brings Greece back under the spotlight with a spot of defaulting on a debt repayment, the collapse of the eurozone, western civilisation, cats and dogs living together. Most of the month is spent in emergency summits with the noble aspiration of avoiding theming Europe as a Mad Max film. On 26 June Seifeddine Rezgui spoke to his father on his mobile phone, finished the call and threw it in the sea. The kalashnikov was hidden in a sun shade. After firing on the tourists on the beach he entered the five star hotel and attacked people until security forces arrived and shot him. 38 people died, 30 of them British.
Iran reaches a nuclear deal in July with the rest of the world. With this and offering to bomb ISIS in Iraq they are going to have to do a great deal of "death to west" stuff to get back up the Axis of Evil League Table. To further sprinkle a spirit of optimism in the month the US and Cuba resume diplomatic relations after just 54 years. Luckily David Cameron brings us back down with a charming speech on immigration, talking of "a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean seeking a better life, wanting to come to Britain". It's a lot to go on - the temerity of people to not want to die of poverty, that their movement is equated as being like insects. But there's more. "Everything that can be done will be done to make sure our borders are secure and make sure that British holidaymakers are able to go on their holidays". Good. The last thing we want is the humble British tourist being put unable to lie on a li-lo in the sea for all the dead bodies washing up on the shore.
August. Summer time. The news (or more importantly, its reporters) goes on holiday. Off duty US soldiers prevent a terrorist attack on a train in France. China's economy has a bit of a wobble, devaluations occur and the rest of the world financial market put on tin hats. In post hand wringing repetition another 200 people die in the Mediterranean in a single attempted crossing..
September sees the swarm take on a very human guise. A picture of a drowned child on a Greek beach fills the media. This is now a crisis. Refugees from principally Syria and Afghanistan are streaming across Europe. Most countries are open armed, Germany and Sweden especially. Britain remains Little Britain until a whipped up public outcry causes the Government to begrudgingly relent. Because mainly it's an odd numbered month Greece has another general election. Back in the UK it's the party conference season and for some the knives are out. In one of those purely coincidental events, at the start of the Conservative party conference a non-dom who may or may not have been promised a cabinet role in the previous government only to find the way barred due to the coalition took his bat and ball home, paid for a hatchet biography to be written resulting in allegations of David Cameron spending quality time with a pig's head whilst participating at an initiation ceremony at university. In other ham fisted moments the Labour party, in full recoil mode from the values that got it elected in 1997 retreats from the political centre and welcomes Jeremy Corbyn as its new leader. A man of principled strong left wing views. A collector of manhole cover photographs. A bogey man of much of the print media, determined to take us back to the three day week of the 1970s and probably communism too. He is all of these things. Corbyn is such an honest and unpolished a figure on the political stage it is un-nerving. I like him but then I'm not a Labour Party member. 2020 may well see George Osborne installed at No.10 but it's still an improvement on Ed Miliband politics as vacuum years. The month closes with France launching airstrikes against ISIS in Syria.
On 26 October the Lords vote down the inevitable bill to remove Tax Credits from people who don't vote Conservative. This is portrayed as the death of democracy and that the Lords will need reforming as they have chosen not to respect the wishes of the House of Parliament. Bar maintaining the status quo it did invite the question what they thought the purpose of the House of Lords was. In a Halloween special a Russian plane was initially reported as crashing on leaving Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt but within days was declared as a terrorist incident with a bomb being placed on the jet. Russia steps up airstrikes in Syria, even hitting some targets not on Bashar al-Assad's hit list.
In November Paris experienced a terrorist attack across the city. In world terrorism league tables it's the 9th worst attack of the year. I defy you to name the #1 - just 2000 estimated deaths by Boko Haram in Nigeria in early January during a 4 day massacre. Anyway, back to Paris. More death. More fear. More anger. People changed their facebook logos to having a French flag background apparently equating a single mouse button click to an expression of empathy for the people involved in the attack, a reinforcement of support of Western values and decrying of immigration being used by terrorists to get into Europe. The city itself is now a status symbol, as rumours of terror attacks were associated with other cities across Europe they receive the tag Paris-style. To ensure tensions didn't get any more heightened in the region Turkey opted to shoot down a Russian fighter jet for straying over its territory.
December continued to be all about France but this time attention was on the World Climate Deal which after years and months of negotiations an agreement was reached. Fraud! was the immediate cry of James Hansen, father of climate change awareness. He viewed the talks as one of promises, not actions. We will literally have to see if the politicians come through with what can only be electorally unpopular measures. Climate change is part of the popular consensus, but so is Netflix (chill optional), Left Shark, buy two get one free, The Only Way is Chelsea, A Place in the Sun and Sia, so good luck with that. Hey they would lie to us would they? That'd be like an international car company programming their cars to misrepresent their environmental credentials when plugged into monitoring equipment. Please hold, we're just getting some news from Germany and Volkswagen....oh. What is clear is that our climate is changing in front of us. On 1st July the UK was experiencing a heatwave, by 26th it had experienced record breaking amounts of rain. August was a washout. September was the warmest ever. 2015 was declared the warmest year on record. In November we all took a bow as the world reached 1 degree centigrade of warming. December saw the NOAA report that record high temperatures were affecting sea ice in the arctic. Following the NOAA's lead, the Met Office in the UK is now naming the storms that cross the UK. It is heartwarming to know that a house has been flooded by Eva or that someone's lost their roof to Frank. It rained somewhere between 3 and 4 times the average for December in the north of the UK. My village has three roads running out of it. One was flooded. One was over a floodplain that was more akin to a lake. The other was clear but leads to West Yorkshire so we won't speak more of it. But I digress. From whatever yacht you're currently fouling you might not notice it but the water levels getting a little higher every day.
So that's 2015 in a nutshell. What can we look forward to in 2016? If 2015 is a trend then sadly it's a cunning mix of terrorism, climate change and more Demi Lovato. But this isn't the big picture - the World Health Organisation don't have terrorism in their top 20 deaths in 2015. I won't do the full run down but it's a familiar list of circulation, respiration and cancer related conditions. By 2030 they predict that more people will die from road injuries than HIV/AIDS. I guess I still will be on the road by then. All in all I'd stay on the boat. For the UK there's the bonus of a referendum on Europe which will in all likelihood stabilise the Tory party but in doing so destroy the Union. Further afield we have the US presidential election to entertain us as we welcome Donald Trump into the hot seat.
Raise a glass to the sun and welcome 2016. We’re going to need a bigger woodpecker.
