Year in Refutile

Oh come, all ye fanciful...

It's one of the strange Christmas paradoxes (along with being 30 years old and watching 6 straight hours of Pixaardman cartoons or gut bubblingly awful episodes of some shit cake, money felch, cocktease game show because the word 'Christmas' has been dumped in front of the title and a bit of tinsel is draped across the studio. Come to think of it, there's something paradoxically dreary about good old shiny tinsel. It reminds me of a sort of enforced, Daily Mail Campaign underdoggery that forces us to clap along with the 'superdooperousness' of Christmas while costing 18 pounds a yard and looking a bit shit as a background to annual misery and passive aggressive family bickering) that at this time of year, my perception of the world both opens up and contracts at the same time, like a sea anemone with a personality crisis.

As I am reminded of the increasing size of my family due to apparently unceasing embryo production and also put in mind of the dismal size of the problems in the world (normally by cynically heartbreaking TV ads encouraging us to give 2 pounds a month instead of pushing obscene quantities of spun sugar into our cavernous head holes) in the same instance, I also feel the world closing in and my range of understanding contract. What's going on outside the realm of oven times, nibble quantities and the best time to put out the ruddy cheese cake because I hate it when it ends up going all mushy, seems a distant nightmare of sight and sound that I can barely make out in the middle distance, allowing me to bob my head back under the water and become soothed by the muffled screams of the lifeguards.

As I spent most of 2011 working in another country, returning to England in early December thrust me immediately into the clunking 'review of the year' hand wringing of newspapers, 4 hour talking head list shows (containing the absurd insights of mysterious comedians) and online photo gallery 2011 obituaries, which, rather than bring me pleasingly up to date, actually added to my sense of disconnection. As Noel Gallagher Version 101 once said; "The more I see the less I know, the more I know the less I understand" which sounds like a grim epitaph for society in general (or it would if we weren't too busy giggling at Royal arses or watching omnipresent perfume adverts that make you want to fall on your knees and pray for the apocalypse).

List shows are pretty anonymous and exist merely to fill your time with soundbite guff, but it's now essential for every channel or digital output medium to scratch around like they're CSI investigators, looking for that last crumb of insight or reduction to capture the feeling of the nation as though it would lead to some sort of glorious event horizon where all meaning is condensed into the single, one sentence opinion from Alan Whothefuckisthatguy from off the tellybox and all races, languages, opinions and facts deemed superfluous so at last we can all go home and I'm left free to establish my Empire (I think that's what they're doing...).

But it's not true. I feel absolutely fine not being able to reduce the London riots into 3 sentences. I actually feel quite satisfied that I have no ability to reconcile the cigar blowing, backslapping pandemonium surrounding the killing of Bin Laden and Gaddafi, whilst simultaneously condemning their own murderous lives. I'm glad I can't put my finger on the pulse of why we both stare through our electrical eye boxes, snickering into our elbows like five year olds, at the death of Kim Jong Il whilst looking the other way as North Korea starve their own people. I feel fine not weeping over the bubbling stew of a year, pleading for it to reduce into the kind of flavoursome jus that would delight the podgy faced, talking egg, greengrocer man from Masterchef.

Perhaps it's a symbol of a struggle to cope with the everyday problems and failures I encounter (failing to retain the receipt for overly snug trousers, suspicious breath tests, tasering strangers and murder charges) that there's a cold but intoxicating comfort in 'rounding up' the year into a drop down menu of 5 minute nostalgia fixes recounted by awkwardly haircutted giggle merchants collecting cash in return for reducing existence to less than 140 characters. Having seen uprisings, fighting, natural disasters of inconceivable power, hacking, humping, injunctions and Royal functions, a never ending picture postcard slideshow of the 'best and worst' of the year seems vastly superior to the horrors of actually having to live through it.

So here's my best of and worst of list of 2011:

Best thing: All of it

Worst thing: All of it.... and Piers Morgan. Obviously.

Cheerio my lovelies, see you for tea and sandwiches on the next episode of Life:The Movie. I've seen the trailer and it looks crap and brilliant all at the same time. Must be a paradox.

IcantstanditIknowyouplanneditI'mgonnasetitstraightthiswatergate xxxx