Everything that happened in 2023 all at once
~ The year in review ~
I WAS delighted to be asked by my friends at ES Magazine to write a review of the year. It’s up online now. But I thought I’d share it here, too, because, well I can… and also, so that I could commission Dall-E to do some illustrations.
JANUARY
THE City groans and the suburbs weep and into the dangerous year we leap. It is 12 degrees here in London with a light south-westerly breeze. The monarch is King Charles III. The Prime Minister is Rishi Sunak. A human turd is found in a sink at the Treasury. I’m just giving you the facts.
In national news, a walrus turns up in Scarborough forcing the council to cancel its fireworks. The international picture is: war in Ukraine and Ethiopia, tensions in Nagorno-Karabakh and the Congo, unrest in Israel and Pakistan, right-wing nutjobs with weird hair. Oxfam reports that the richest 1 percent have claimed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth created since 2020. Most of the remaining 99 percent have quiet quit.
Prince Harry releases his memoir and pretty soon everyone has read it except for Prince Harry. Among the revelations: frostbitten penis; losing virginity to randy pub lady; fist fights with Prince William; killing c.25 Afghans; taking ayahuasca. “The saddest thing about this is it never needed to get to this point,” Harry laments on ITV.
Geophysicists report that the Earth’s inner core is now rotating at a slower rate than the planet’s surface. It doesn’t really change anything. They just thought we’d like to know. Open A.I.’s ChatGPT is downloaded by 100 million people and everyone becomes tremendously excited about artificial intelligence. How was it for you, ChatGPT?
“I don't have feelings or consciousness, so I didn't experience any emotions when or after I was launched to the public. I am a machine-learning model created by OpenAI called GPT-3.5, and I lack subjective experiences.”
Yeah, but imagine you do have feelings!
“I can imagine that if I were sentient, being launched to the public might have been a mix of excitement and uncertainty.”
If even ChatGPT feels ambivalence about the future, how are the rest of us supposed to feel?
FEBRUARY
The month opens with the biggest day of industrial action in over a decade. Teachers are on strike, children are everywhere, road and rail chaos. We’re in the dying days of the Conservative regime, 13 years, now. Jesus. After the high dramas of 2022, a mood of ennui has set in, punctuated by random acts of cruelty. Lee Anderson floats the reintroduction of the death penalty. Suella Braverman is still dead set on flying refugees to Rwanda. Sir Keir Starmer just terrified of messing this up.
Crop failures in the Maghreb mean there’s a tomato shortage. In February! What is the world coming to? But lettuce is surprisingly resilient. Former PM Liz Truss argues that her economic policies were never given a chance. It was because the pound was too round. It was because the purges didn’t go far enough.
It was because of what the woke brigade has done to Roald Dahl. Augustus Gloop is on Ozempic now. The Oompa Loompas are being paid reparations. The Fleshlumpeater is vegan. The Grand High Witch is marching around the Home Office, demanding results. Sucks to be you.
MARCH
Ri$hi $unak publishes his tax returns. He has made £4.8 million over the past three years: £410,000 from doing his actual job and £4.4 million from “investments”, i.e., simply being extremely rich already. If only the rest of the country followed his example, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Everything Everywhere All At Once wins all the Oscars and while no one has seen it, everyone feels it, because everything really is happening everywhere all at once.
Everyone is furious about Covid. Everyone is furious about Gary Lineker. The former footballer tweets that the Government’s anti-migrant rhetoric is “immeasurably cruel” which basically makes him just as bad as the Government because Governments have feelings too, you know? Match of the Day goes out with no commentary and no analysis. They should try that for the news sometime.
A man in Belgium kills himself after discussing the end of the world with a chatbot named Eliza.
APRIL
We have entered a New Age of Tragedy, says the American foreign policy expert Robert D. Kaplan. “Tragic thinking encompasses many things, among them the realisation that fear is useful.”
Donald Trump pleads not guilty in one of many trials that if anything increase his chances of being America’s next president. A SpaceX starship explodes on launch. No one’s on Twitter anymore, it’s all just Elon Musk fanboys tweeting about how white people need to have more babies. Researchers demonstrate that parrots enjoy Facetiming one another.
MAY
The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. Padam, padam. A baby is born with three parents. Padam, padam. IBM begins work on a 100,000-qubit quantum computer. Padam, padam. Wind power is now the main source of electricity in the UK. Padam, padam. A Nigerian senator is sentenced to nine years for kidnapping a street vendor and bringing him to the UK for the purposes of procuring his kidney. Padam, padam. It’s the sound of a human heartbeat.
The past is still here, and in fact never truly goes away. Heartwarming scenes at the Coronation as the crown is lowered onto Charles III's splendid bonce. Everyone comments on how strong Penny Mordaunt is, holding that sword. Look at those arms! There’s a big lunch, shortbread, coronation mince, bunting, the lot. A million Percy Pigs are set free down the Mall. Gog and Magog rise from their slumber. While Britain is looking the other way, the World Snooker Championship is won by a Belgian.
Sweden wins the Eurovision Song Contest. Kylie wins pop. Tom wins Succession. Hollywood writers go on strike about A.I., residual payments and the fact that everyone just wants “second-screen content” now, i.e. stuff you can have on in the background while looking at your phone. All the good TV is Australian now.
In the Aquila constellation, a dying star is observed ingesting a Jupiter-like planet in a single gulp. “The other hot Jupiters we have previously studied are being delicately licked and nibbled," explains a scientist. “This is a different sort of eating.” This will apparently happen to Earth in 5 billion years.
Padam, padam, I know you want to take me home, padam, padam, and take off all my clothes.
JUNE
Philip Schofield leaves ITV in tears. Elton John bows out at Glastonbury. Love Island? Bitter Recriminations Island more like. Manchester City complete a historic treble and Jack Grealish goes on a month-long bender. Carrie Johnson is a mumfluencer. Gonorrhoea and syphilis at record highs. Only the inheritocracy can afford to live in London now.
Half-hearted coup in Russia. Riots in France. Surprise, surprise, A.I. image generators are being used to create images horrific sexual abuse. The Rwanda plan is ruled unlawful. Enshittification = the tendency for any given platform (Amazon, Google, Twitter, Humans) to become worse over time. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb is convinced he has found evidence of aliens.
JULY
The Barbenheimer publicity war gets way out of hand and Christopher Nolan drops a thermonuclear device on the Barbie house in Malibu. In the end it makes no difference. Greta Gerwig’s movie is the highest-grossing release of the year. What Nolan should have done is get Nicky Minaj to do the theme song.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle part company with Spotify after failing to dream up any workable podcasts for $20 million. Apparently one of Harry’s ideas was “to interview guests like Vladimir Putin, Mark Zuckerberg, and Donald Trump on their childhood trauma to see how they became the people they are today”.
Twitter is now X and everyone migrates to Threads. Big first-day-at-uni vibes, everyone on their best behaviour, like, what A-levels did you do? Remember when the internet was fun? Why are we like this? It lasts about an afternoon and everyone goes back to TikTok.
The Sun publishes heavy insinuations about an unnamed BBC presenter who turns out to be Huw Edwards. Poor guy. The longest doctors’ strike in British history begins. Labour has a 25 point poll lead over the Conservatives. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Hottest month, globally, on record. Musk challenges Zuckerberg to a cage fight. Seismic activity registered at a Taylor Swift concert. 18 million doses of the first-ever malaria vaccine administered in Africa. Considering 52 billion people are estimated to have been killed by mosquitos since the dawn of time, pretty major.
AUGUST
Summer! Our job is: beach. There’s a four-fold increase in sightings of Red Admiral butterflies. A study reveals you don’t need to walk 10,000 steps a day, 3,967 is fine. For the first time in UK chart history, the top six singles are by solo female artists: Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa, Olivia Rodrigo (x2), Taylor Swift and Peggy Gou. Peggy who? Peggy Gou. Her one goes, like, nanana nanana nanana nanana nanana nanana. It’s all about: status olives, post-liberalism and Guinness as personality.
Spain beat England in the Women’s World Cup and it’s not OK to kiss a colleague on the lips. Russian mercenary Yevgeny Prigozhin is killed in a plane crash. Conductor Sir John Eliot Gardner, 80, is upbraided after smacking a bass baritone in the face at a concert in France. Sadiq Khan’s ULEZ extension comes into force and the tenor of ranting on suburban forecourts is unbearable.
A 23-year-old woman named Lily has a profound thought while waiting for a bus in Catford. But she deleted all her social media, so what the hell is she supposed to do with the thought now? Just, like think it? Gross!
SEPTEMBER
Images from the James Webb Space Telescope lead scientists to conclude that everything we thought we knew about the universe is wrong. Rupert Murdoch retires from NewsCorp. “Yes, he had a terrible force to him, and a fierce ambition, that could push you to the side," says Kendall Roy. "But it was only that human thing, the will to be, and to be seen, and to do.” Overheard at a London spa: “I did 13 weeks of zero carb, zero sugar and than I had a pain au chocolat and I thought I was dying.” Who would have imagined that a dog called the American Bully XL would be so aggressive?
The comedian turned "ooh, makes you think" influencer Russell Brand is accused by four women of rape and sexual coercion and everyone remembers how toxic the ‘00s were. Everyone wakes up to what Britney was going through. Maybe things are a little better now? The Sugababes reform and so in time will Girls Aloud.
“The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” says US National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan.
OCTOBER
Jupiter-sized planets are detecting floating around the Orion constellation, untethered from any star. Suella Braverman isn’t having it. She wants them rounded up and flown to Rwanda. She uses her Conservative party conference speech to warn of a “hurricane” of migrants about to hit the UK. The weather is in fact unseasonably mild.
Not to be outdone, Rishi Sunak announces the cancellation of the HS2 rail link to Manchester in Manchester and wonders why everyone is booing. Lawrence Fox, already banned from GB News, which takes some doing, is arrested "on suspicion of conspiring to commit criminal damage to ULEZ cameras.”
Hamas terrorists break out of Gaza and into Israel where they murder, torture, maim and kidnap hundreds of innocent people. The death toll is over 1,200, the biggest single act of violence against Jews since the Holocaust. “All the places where Hamas hides, operates from — we will turn them into cities of ruins,”says Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. By December the death toll in Gaza will stand at 15,000, an estimated two-thirds of them women and children.
We can’t understand one another's pain. The people who express sympathy are ignorant. The people who try to add context are heartless. The people who call for a ceasefire are naive. The people who say nothing are complicit. We are all complicit simply by being born.
It's a headache for Sir Keir Starmer. He has glitter thrown over him at the Labour Party conference but it was a protest about something else. Boris Johnson joins GB News. The Covid pandemic was the “wrong crisis” for him learns the Covid enquiry. It’s always the wrong crisis.
NOVEMBER
The Fat Bear Winter is upon us. Everyone is totally delulu. No one has rizz anymore. Enshittification continues unabated. There are peace marches in London every Saturday now.
Liz Truss appears alongside all the other ex-PMs at the Cenotaph to mark Remembrance Day. If she lives to the age of 97, she will spend more days doing this than she was actually Prime Minister. Soon-to-be-ex-PM Rishi Sunak interviews Musk about A.I. at Bletchley Park and comes across like a second-rate podcast host. He does at least sack Suella Braverman.
An interstellar burst - and David Cameron is back to save the universe. Boardroom shenanigans at Open A.I. New Home Secretary James Cleverly refuses to deny that he called the Rwanda policy "batshit".
It has become all-too apparent that short of providing an exciting new future, all A.I. can do is remix the mistakes of the recent past.
It has become all-too apparent that short of providing an exciting new future, all the Tories can do is remix the mistakes of the recent past.
Nigel Farage’s bum is glimpsed on I’m a Celebrity. A brief pause in the Israeli onslaught of Gaza allows for an exchange of hostages. Everyone argues about marbles instead.
DECEMBER
Hey ChatGPT, maybe you could leave us on a more optimistic note?
“It’s a December to remember in the UK. The nation experiences a cultural and scientific renaissance. Adele and Sir David Attenborough join forces for a charity concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Dr. Sarah Patel and Nobel laureate Sir Roger Penrose unveil a game-changing quantum discovery at Oxford.
Emma Watson and Idris Elba champion environmental causes. Prime Minister Emma Thompson and London Mayor Sadiq Khan amplify eco-causes, urging global collaboration, setting a hopeful tone for a brighter future.”
I’m not particularly reassured by that, to be honest.
“I understand. In reality, the future is unpredictable, and it can bring a mix of challenges and positive developments. It's crucial to stay informed through reliable news sources and to actively engage in positive actions that contribute to the well-being of individuals and the planet.”
Merry Christmas to you too.