Another Year Over

Will anyone miss the Noughties?

I almost missed the end of them. I worked yesterday and the day before, and on each day a fault in the overhead lines meant there were no trains home, so on each day I stood in driving rain for 30 minutes before embarking on the hell that is an 84 bus journey. And on each day the heating on the bus wasn’t working.

So, I woke up this morning (sounds like I’m about to sing the blues, but I’m not), with my face on either side of my nose felling as if it was filled with plasticene and an alarming tendency to suddenly snort backwards for no reason. I got up, pottered about for 2 hours, then thought “I’m cold, I’m going back to bed for an hour”, and woke up at ten this evening. I’ve apparently missed an eclipse, my dad’s New Year’s Eve phone call and the Great Escape. 

If it were any other day I would have stayed on in bed, but there’s Jools Holland  to be watched, countdowns to be counted down and old acquaintances to be forgot (well, the song says we should), so I’ve got up, and now have no idea at what time I’m going to be able to go back to sleep again.

Anyway, back to my original question. From my own, selfish (what else) point of view it was the decade of scary mental crap and crappy health scares. But through all this I found that I had friends who cared deeply and supported me, so the Pollyanna in me (not a phrase I use very often) sees some good to even that. And there was much of the past decade that was fun. My children got to see Majorca, and Ibiza, and Malta, and Turkey. Mrs Tin & I had an unbelievable 5 days in New York to celebrate 25 years goin’ with each other. We were able to live without financial fear. Because we worked hard. 

As the Noughties end we tend to look back at them as a decade of madness, where we all lost the run of ourselves and finally got our deserved comeuppance. We look back at them like this because that it what we’ve been told to think, by people who keep trying to persuade us that it was all our own fault, so that we won’t focus too much on the fact that it was actually theirs.

We’re told that what’s happening now is a good thing, that we will return to traditional values like community, and caring. This is a fairly rose-tinted view of a past Ireland which, as we’ve seen over the past year, was a all too often a land of cruelty, hypocrisy and suffering, with the poor and the unprotected bearing the brunt of it all.

I’m hoping we don’t return to anything, but in fact move forward to something better.

Happy New Year to all of you, my dear fellow bloggers. Thank you all for the past year, and I hope we all keep in touch during the coming one.

Tinman.