2020; a vintage year…
31 Dec 2020
Dear LPG,
I think that, in five years’ time the year of 2020 will be perhaps a very good year for finding questions for all the television and pub quizzes that we have all become used to.
There will be questions about Harry and Megan and the way they chose to resign from being royal while Donald Trump got the sack, and our own Boris Johnson did not emerge unscarred. We officially left the European Union at the beginning of the year and then completely forgot about all that while we battled with the pandemic of the century. I hope when it is done the 21st Century will not have to face anything that hits the whole world like that for a long time to come and, from my perspective, the government’s directives about what the general public needed to do in order to keep safe will go down in history as the most confusing set of instructions ever given.
The Grand National, the London Marathon, the European Song contest, the Glastonbury Music festival, Wimbledon, Edinburgh Festival, Notting Hill Carnival and Olympics either never happened this year, were postponed, or looked very different. Even the televised Remembrance service was an affair where so many of the usual participants were conspicuous because of their absence.
The whole world learned to live without their nation’s equivalent of pubs, clubs and churches as we all settled into self-distancing and lockdown, and the list of shop and business logos which we will never see again continues to get longer and longer. We learned a lot more about visiting the doctor without leaving the house. Holidays were cancelled or postponed as we all learned the word ‘furloughed’ and what it would come to mean to our sons, daughters, nieces, nephews and older grandchildren, while so many pensioners had to either learn to live with loneliness or work out how to make a successful video telephone call. Our hands learned what it feels like to spend more and more time either immersed in water or sanitising gel. We learned to shop on line or wear a mask, the true value of television when it comes to passing the time, some of us caught up with things that we have promised to do around the house for years and many of us learned how to value our friends more closely while not being able to shake a hand or give a hug.
As we say goodbye to it I think that 2020 will be a vintage year for quiz questions…
SD Sydenham
