Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

How to put a positive spin on the bizarre events of this year

We are witnessing the baby steps of a truly mass political engagement

issue 10 December 2016

This is going to be a positive, optimistic column. I promise. Because, look, let’s be honest, I’ve been a bit moany this year, haven’t I? Which may, I suspect, have been a bit misleading. Read me here, or indeed anywhere, and I suspect you could come away thinking I’ve spent the last 12 months, or at least the last six, lying awake, staring at my expensive north London Farrow & Ball ceiling, weeping sad, shuddering, self-indulgent tears at a world moving beyond my ken. I know, I know. I do go on.

Whereas actually, it hasn’t really been like that. For one thing, the bedroom ceiling is just white, so Farrow & Ball would have been a terrible waste and I think we just went with the cheap stuff from Homebase in the end, and that was years ago so it’s all a bit cracked now and frankly not the sort of ceiling you’d expect a cheerleader of the metropolitan liberal elite to have at all — unless you’ve been to one of their houses, of course, in which case you might have looked around in some disappointment and wondered if we were all just doing it for the lols.

More importantly, I’ve actually been quite cheerful. The news has been upsetting, yes, and it has sometimes felt personally so, even though I didn’t actually know David Bowie. Still, anybody working in news who hasn’t found quite a lot of this year utterly thrilling really ought to have been working somewhere else. News, moreover, is just a part of anybody’s life, wherever you work. For me, more importantly, my kids have been happy, my family are all still here, and my newly acquired gym habit has seen me drop a stone and pick up biceps to rival Michelle Obama.

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