In defence of 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.