That Was The Year That Was

What do I know?

As screenwriter William Goldman (The Princess Bride) wrote in his 1982 memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade

Nobody Knows Anything

And looking back to January 2020, I could not have predicted that I would live through historic times:

• the stout guarding of George Eliot’s statue in Nuneaton Market Square in case any protestors felt the need to vandalise the author of Mill on the Floss;
• the (final) Brexit deal, heralding months and years of further bureaucratic wrangling (thank goodness the deal is “oven-ready”) but hopefully there is an end to the Tory EuroPsychoDrama which distracts, deflects and divides;
• the clear and democratic defeat of President Trump in a corrosive American election;
• the clamping down by Chinese authorities on civil liberties in Hong Kong;
• the (to date) almost 83,000,000 cases and almost 2,000,000 deaths from a global, deadly pandemic.

What I DO know.

I know I’ve done a lot of local walking, completed a lot of jigsaw puzzles, re-read Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son, read a lot of other books (including my book of the year, Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet), watched a lot of TV, attended lectures, interviews and Tai Chi classes online, watched theatre online and extracted every ounce of pleasure I could from the family and friends I’ve managed to see with the changing (and sometimes confusing) restrictions, lockdown and tiers. I know one daughter was furloughed for a time (and has worked from her home for much of the time.) I know another daughter continued training to become a nurse (including working on Covid wards and now helping deliver the vaccine.) I know my wife attended French and ballet classes and a book group online and I know she continued to work (safely) at a local Food Bank which, in 2010, delivered 600 bags a year and currently delivers 600 bags a week…. anyone care to speculate what social policies have led to the increase in the demand for food parcels?

Rainbows everywhere

In windows, on hillsides, in the sky…. Rainbows expressed appreciation towards key workers. Compassion, kindness and solidarity triumphed over selfishness after the initial panic of the approaching first lockdown and before the cynicism of the Autumn. The environment bounced back. Birds filled the air. Nature triumphed. In the Spring and Summer children rode bicycles freely on emptier-than-usual roads. Until this year the record for the speed of developing a vaccine was held by the 1960s mumps jab, but the glory (and hard work) of scientists cooperating around the world have produced two safe and effective vaccines for Covid-19 within a year, and a third vaccine is imminent. Hopefully the days are over for those who believe Michael Gove’s soundbite that “people have had enough of experts….” (Particularly those who never heard Gove’s pitiful attempts to wriggle out of saying it in the months following.)

Women-led countries

An analysis by academics at Liverpool and Reading Universities of the initial governmental policy responses to Covid-19 up to 19th May, adjusted for variables (GDP, population density etc), concluded that countries led by women handled the pandemic “systematically and significantly better” than those led by men, particularly ones following a populist agenda (take a bow, Trump, Bolsanaro and BoJo.) So, let’s hear it for Finland’s Sanna Marin, Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen, New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen and Germany’s Angela Merkel. “When women-led countries are compared to countries similar to them along a range of characteristics, they have performed better, experiencing fewer cases as well as fewer deaths.”

So, looking back through the diary of my little life for 2020, what did I comment upon?

January & February 2020

• Confirmation reaches the UK Media that Chinese people are dying of a novel virus, probably originating in a wet market in Wuhan. (As the weeks go by, I convince myself that my 33 days of coughing and high temperature in November and December of 2019 are not connected. I am NOT Patient Zero.) The Republican-controlled Senate acquits President Trump of charges of abuse of power and obstructing congress; in February President Trump tells a rally that the now-identified Covid-19 virus will be gone by April.

In my little life I saw Cats, Little Women, Star Wars: the Rise of Skywalker, Jojo Rabbit, EMMA. and Parasite at the cinema. At the theatre I saw King John, A Museum in Baghdad and The Whip at the RSC, the musical Gypsy at Manchester’s Royal Exchange, Ballet Rambert at Bradford Alhambra and I went to a Van Gogh audio-visual display in York. I enjoyed a cheese and wine evening in Leeds with a pal, attended a school reunion in Wakefield and marvelled at the National Space Centre in Leicester. To celebrate Valentine’s Day, Sally and I chugged along on a steam train with Prosecco and afternoon tea. (Meanwhile, Covid-19 rolls down the line to Italy….)

March & April 2020

• The World Health Organisation declares that Covid-19 is a pandemic, Italy goes into full lockdown and, after increasing clamour from health experts, the UK government locks down, and the “Clap for Carers” begins on Thursday nights at 8pm. For a fortnight, supermarkets struggle to fill shelves with particular items. Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister is diagnosed with Covid-19 and Keir Starmer becomes Labour leader. Captain Tom Moore becomes a hero by doing laps of his garden on a zimmer frame and raising £32m for the NHS. The Queen reassures the nation. President Trump suggests injecting bleach and bringing light inside the body (worth quoting verbatim for the record):

"I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs…. I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you're going to test that too... So, we'll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute - that's pretty powerful."

In my little life I saw Dark Waters, Military Wives and Onward at the cinema and Acosta Danza (Carlos Acosta dance group) at the Alhambra Theatre in Bradford. They were the final trips to the cinema and theatre until the Autumn because of lockdown or tier restrictions. Final meals out, final family gatherings, the beginnings of Skype and Zoom group calls, the scheduling of WALKING began. Emily returned home to live in our attic in isolation as she worked on a “hot ward” and subsequently recovered from what was almost certainly Covid symptoms. My niece, and then my sister, were diagnosed with (and hospitalised by) Covid-19 in April – thankfully both went on to recover. NT Live, YouTube, quality TV and lectures online filled time and Tai Chi classes switched to online.

May & June 2020

• Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s claim of delivering 100,000 Covid tests a day is debunked when he has to admit that what he meant was that the bulk of them had been put in the post. UK government credibility is undermined by advisor Dominic Cummings’s ludicrous version of his trip to County Durham and Barnard Castle. George Floyd, an unarmed black man, is unlawfully killed by police in Minneapolis. Marcus Rashford leads a successful campaign for free school meals for disadvantaged children.

In my little life I attended my first Zoom funeral (very impressive) and phrases like “socially distanced” became ubiquitous. The Hay Festival successfully broadcast its talks and performances online. Our future holidays were cancelled. We got a new bed and in May became an “empty nest” again.

July & August 2020

• Chancellor Rishi Sunak launches an Eat Out To Help Out scheme to revive the hospitality industry. Joe Biden chooses Kamala Harris as a running mate to stand against Donald Trump later in the year. The awarding of GCSE and A Level results is a fiasco that was predicted and could easily have been avoided and the hapless Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, keeps his job after the first of what seems like a series of gaffes and U-turns that continues through the rest of the year.

In my little life we celebrated our 34th wedding anniversary with a picnic and walk on Penistone Hill. We were able to meet friends in the garden – but only until August 1st. The birth of Great Niece Charlotte added new life to the wider Johnson clan, a welcome miracle in the middle of the year. The RSC started broadcasting the Talking Shakespeare series of interviews. Pre-Covid arrangements and maskless supermarket shopping seemed to be a very distant memory.

September & October 2020

• The “world-beating” (organised by the PM’s private sector chums) Test and Trace system fails as schools and office workers return at the same time to superspread Covid-19 and kickstart the second wave of infections. Jacinda Ardern wins a landslide victory in the New Zealand elections having shown clear leadership in dealing with the pandemic. Having publicly argued with the Mayors of Middlesborough and Manchester about regional lockdown rules, Boris Johnson announces a second national lockdown for November.

In my little life I went to the cinema once: The Perfect Candidate and, gloriously, went to Leeds Playhouse to see some socially distanced theatre: Orpheus in the Record Shop, Krapp’s Last Tape and La Voix Humaine. My 60th birthday came and went without pomp but with good food, a terrific hike and Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby.

November & December 2020

• The second national lockdown makes some, but not enough, impact on the rising cases of Covid-19 but the world celebrates as a German-Turkish couple, Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin, produce an effective vaccine at Pfizer. Dominic Cummings (and Lee Cain) exit from UK power struggles in 10 Downing Street and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris decisively win the US Presidential election with a bigger margin than Trump beat Clinton in 2016. A 90-year old grandmother from Coventry, Margaret Keenan, becomes the first (non-clinical-trial) person in the world to receive a fully-tested and approved Covid vaccine. Second in line for the jab in Warwickshire was 81-year old William Shakespeare….!

In my little life, I squeezed in one cinema trip: Uncle Vanya and was deliriously happy when the US election made sense of my hope in humanity. I started my re-reading of all Shakespeare’s works with Two Gentlemen of Verona and we began having posh takeaways delivered once a week to “celebrate” another week survived. As the year ended we managed to see a good number of friends in outdoor venues and the Christmas spirit endured in spite of the government’s poor communication skills.

So what next?

It would be good to think that 2021 will be the year when lessons learned from the pandemic begin to bear fruit. That....

• the “rat race” is not the only way to live
• home working is possible
• a long daily commute is not conducive to good living
• nature is indispensable
• a cleaner environment is achievable
• community resources are value for money
• the arts bring entertainment, inspiration and solace to millions
• local expertise is invaluable
• experts are worth attending to
• heroes come in all shapes, sizes, creeds and colour
• an equal right for one is an equal right for all
• carers, volunteers and key workers are more important in a crisis than pin-striped hedge-fund managers
• compassion and kindness are free
• the welfare state is as precious as the NHS
• magic money trees are not and have never been real – because where there’s a (political) will, there’s a (financial) way.

New Year. New Decade. Welcome to the future....  

No Time Like The Present

 

Approaching 60: Carpe Diem.

Whatever gets you through the night

Carpe Diem has had a new potency in these unstable times – seizing the day, appreciating the moment, living in the present. (As someone once said….) Plan like you’re going to live forever; live like you’re going to die tomorrow. The Covid-19 pandemic and its fatalities, casualties, pressures, ripple-effect economic blights and uncertainties conspire to to drag hearts and souls into the abyss of despondency. On the other hand, Captain Tom Moore, Marcus Rashford, Jacinda Ardern and millions more people have lifted our aspirations towards a better world. In some ways, I have no idea where Time has gone since the middle of February 2020 when Coronovirus started being publicised internationally. Pre-Covid seems like 10 years ago. Copying Dickens’s opening to A Tale of Two Cities, (as I have done more than once in this blog) the past year has been “the best of times…. the worst of times…. wisdom…. foolishness…. belief…. incredulity…. light…. darkness…. hope…. despair…. we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way….” And when I publish my next new post, I’ll be 60 years of age. Carpe Diem. In 1790, John Trusler, compiling proverbs, glossed the title of today’s post with “No time like the present, a thousand unforeseen circumstances may interrupt you at a future time.” So true.

Rainbows to Trumpkin, Sense to Nonsense

Lockdown Spring

Two households, both Locked Down in dignity....

Seasons come and seasons go
One of the luckiest privileges of My Life In Lockdown is having a panoramic meadow and woods within walking distance of the house.  When Spring 2020 started bursting, as the reality of Lockdown began, it became an endless fascination on the same walk to see how colours, shapes and textures changed as Nature resurrected its glorious self, free for the most part from a significant volume of traffic fumes. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to notice the ecstatic increase in the sounds of birds. Was that illusory? Could the insane variety and volume of chirruping have always been there?  I’ve always delberately walked down (and driven, I admit) roads where I knew blossom trees were exploding in colour; this year my eyes seemed to bathe in blossom more intensely.

Brighter traces of her steps….
Spring reminds me of my Mum (her birthday, her in the garden, her love of flowers – see Nothing is so beautiful as Spring) and every year I think of the ancient Greek proverb A society grows great when old people plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in – a proverb brought to life in 2020 by charity fundraiser, (Captain) Tom Moore. As usual, Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Brontës and Dickens are easy to mine for quotations about Spring but, this year, it feels to me that Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre wrote a sentence which is worth clinging onto as Covid-19 continues to spread its fatal droplets:

“Spring drew on…and a greenness grew over those brown beds, which, freshening daily, suggested the thought that Hope traversed them at night, and left each morning brighter traces of her steps.”

Time to stand and stare
I’ll finish this Lockdown Spring riff with a poem I’ve quoted before (here). The “SuperTramp” poet, WH Davies, has had a revival during Lockdown since his words require you to slow down the pace, step away from the rat race, and breathe calmly.

Leisure by W H Davies

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

"Truly Heart-stirring Relic"

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, begun in 1847, looks after key properties and materials today

September 1847
September always feels like a time of renewal – throughout my school years and my career as a teacher it always signalled the start of the new term, new books, new pens, turning over a new leaf. It signals the month when Autumn begins and the Summer fades fast. April, wrote T S Eliot in The Wasteland, “is the cruellest month” but for me April means my Mum’s and Sister’s birthdays and (not-so-secretly for those who know me) Shakespeare’s birthday on the 23rd April (which was also his death day and has been designated the feast of St George…) We often make unremarkable dates significant by remembering personal events – the first time or the last time we did something…. September also contains a historical twanging thrill for me, a secret celebration, I know, for many Shakespeare fanatics…. In 1847 an auction took place in London advertising the sale of “The Truly Heart-stirring Relic of a Most Glorious Period, and of England’s Immortal Bard.” What we now know as Shakespeare’s Birthplace was up for public sale and celebrities as grand as Prince Albert and Charles Dickens were promoters of “saving the house for the nation.” Stratford-upon-Avon has never looked back, though it was an uphill struggle to keep the project on track and every year sees challenges to the promotion of Shakespeare’s genius. One of my favourite blogs (The Shakespeare Blog by Sylvia Morris) details the struggle and the commemoration of the auction in 2017.

Shakespeare flirting with both Comedy and Tragedy in a Richard Westall painting at the Birthplace Trust and London scenes from recent visits to The Globe on the South Bank in London.

Great British Secret Santa

Merry Christmas, Mr Scrooge

In the bottom left of the above collage is the RSC Christmas tree. In recent times, it has become a tradition to visit our second home in Badby in December (not to mention many other times in the year) for a “Secret Santa” weekend and include a visit to whatever the Royal Shakespeare Company are staging as their Christmas show.

Want and Ignorance

This year the RSC staged A Christmas Carol, a David Edgar adaptation of Charles Dickens’s novel. Aiden Gillet was a volatile, vulnerable Ebenezer Scrooge (played in the same production last year by the snarly and ultimately adorable Phil Davis.) Joseph Timms played an energetic, angry and moving Charles Dickens whose efforts to write a story about Want and Ignorance conflicted with his publishers’ desire to give the public a heartwarming comical tale.

Plenty and Enough

It seems perverse and hypocritical in some ways to delve into Dickens’s world of sympathy for the vulnerable and yet enjoy and celebrate my own wonderful Plenty – plenty presents, plenty treats, plenty food, plenty drink…. But that’s the Way of the World. Take action when you can; give where you feel able; have compassion always.

Blenheim Palace

The unusual thing we did this year was attend the Blenheim Palace Illuminated Lights Walk, a busy but magical experience. There were extraordinary colour-changing waterfalls of light, neon tunnels, fairy trails and aerial poppy-themed paths.

Bright Lights for Winter Nights 

Penguins, Snowmen, Bridges, Chalets, a Gingerbread House, a giant Lotus on the lake, tree trunks looking like pantomime stage sets and bulb after bulb flooding the winter night with colour sensations.

The sweet sorrow of Christmas Bells

Castle Howard afternoon tea

Castle Howard and Chatsworth
After our visit to Burton Agnes to see the homemade decorations earlier this month we also recently visited Castle Howard for afternoon tea (thank you, Emily!) and then called into Chatsworth to see what efforts they’d made for Christmas. There’s a contradiction in my old-fashioned socialist values that these giant houses exist, but like the monarchy, as long as they’re “paying their way” and generating leisure and historical perspectives I can reconcile my conscience.

Stories past and present
I’m in my element in a stately home or castle. Every room is riddled with ghostly stories, past and present. Some real events, some imagined fantasies.

Every room tells a story
You can imagine as you wander through corridors that all the rooms have been inhabited by individuals with hopes, dreams, griefs, triumphs, sadnesses, loves and loathings. At this time of year every room and staircase in Castle Howard and Chatsworth is also trimmed with creative and colourful Christmas paraphernalia. The Christmas themes are gloriously sparkling and gaudy, and somehow also equally moving and poignant.

High expectations
Yes, Christmas time is a time to gather with loved ones and indulge in excessive food and drink. Yes, it is a time to wish peace and good will to all women and men. Yes, it is a time when it is glorious to give and wonderful to receive. We dream, we aspire, we laugh, we love, we buy into the illusion of it being a special time of year. God bless us, everyone!

Painful memories
But of course it is a series of days just like any other series of days and we might be reminded of souls departed, absent loved ones, victims of homelessness and loneliness, migrants and the dispossessed, the poor and the needy, the bereaved and the traumatised. God bless us, everyone!

The shock and awe of the Nativity
Even the Nativity story is cockeyed with sweet sorrow: on the one hand there is

• an adorable baby
• picturesque shepherds and lambs and
• fairy-godmother-style-ThreeKingsFollowingAStar;

Angels on high at Castle Howard

and on the other hand there are

• migrants being oppressed by an occupying army’s controlling census
• a (supernatural?) unexpected pregnancy
• an accommodation crisis and
• a jealous king planning to Slaughter all the Innocents throughout the region.

A combination of fairy tale, religion, Myth, Legend, Eastenders and a horror film.

Angels on high
The decorations at Castle Howard were themed “angels on high” and everywhere you looked pairs of wings, cherubs, stylized angels or suggestions of angels peered down. Some were in windows, some in silhouette, some in precarious positions and some were suggested by ribbons or drapes. Some were intimate in nature, some were flamboyant and some seemed shy and half-hidden in Christmas trees.

Chatsworth House: Oh Dickens

Oh Dickens
Chatsworth, following its brilliant Fashion-themed displays earlier in the year, provided a Dickensian treat for Christmas. Books and quotations from Dickens tumbled down from piles of books and threads of fabric. The story of A Christmas Carol featured prominently, as you might expect (including a ghastly trembling animatronic Scrooge) but so did The Old Curiosity Shop, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, Little Dorrit and, near the end a tragically truthful Miss Havisham from Great Expectations haunting her wedding breakfast table, decayed and cobwebby.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
The opening of Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities contains that famous paradoxical repetition and Christmas can be like that. It was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…. Christmas contains all these contrasts.

Christmas contrasts 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was inspired to write the following poem in 1863 during the American Civil War when his son disobeyed his fatherly instructions and went off to fight for the Union. The poem inspired the carol I Heard the bells on Christmas Day and whilst it celebrates many Christamassy ideas, it also captures the contrasts of right and wrong, war and peace, night and day, love and hate.

Christmas Bells
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."

Miss Havisham from Great Expectations haunts her wedding breakfast....

Stories future
And so Goodbye Christmas for another year. Goodbye to 2017. Goodbye to 2 years of 5 blogs a month. From January I’ll spend less time blogging and more time working on editing my Rhenium Tales. 2018 will be the year in which I send my words to a book agent to see if anyone outside my life might be interested. Will the bells ring for me? Time will tell.

The incredible melting snowman - will this be a symbol of me in 2018? Or will I be the Christmas cake with a chunk ripped out of it? Or the smiling guy at the Thompson's Secret Santa table, full of tidings of comfort and joy....

2017 Secret Santa

Badby
A long-standing tradition with the Thompsons in Badby is to meet for an early Christmas dinner and swap secret Santa presents. And so it was again and so it was (again) marvellous. Capped by a David Edgar-penned Royal Shakespeare Company production of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, spectacularly beautiful but also capturing the hard-nosed original message about child and family poverty. Truly a production for our times (pictures courtesty of the RSC website and Manuel Harlan. I’ve riffed on Christmas in the past (here and here and here.) What do I feel this year?

RSC production of Dickens's A Christmas Carol, photos from RSC website by Manuel Harlan 

2017
There are plenty of personal highlights in 2017 but I feel that the world has been a crueller place with a pernicious abuse of social media, catastrophic fake news and volatile (often bullying) political decisions. I can only hope that 2017 will be a kinder, more compassionate, more intelligent period for humanity. The next generations coming along deserve a better world. Can we not achieve that? Let’s see…. the readiness is all.

Time will tell

The tree of life, the tables of plenty and the pleasures of friendship

The epoch of incredulity
I’ve quoted this before, and I’m going to quote it again, surely one of the best openings of any novels from any age – from Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way….

Emily and Harriet in 2016

The best of times
On a personal level, 2016 has been a very happy year with some great reading, memorable theatre, excellent TV, terrific cinema. I’ve started to write an epic dystopian saga (yes, I have) and my first reader, daughter Emily, has given me astute feedback; Nick Shelton has turned pictures in my head for Rhenium Tales into some wonderful illustrations. Sally and I had a lovely time at our 30th wedding anniversary party in July and we’ve had relaxing holidays in Scotland, France, Barcelona and London and gorgeous weekends in Badby.

Will the world in The Rhenium Wars become as vivid in my imagination as Middle Earth or Westeros....?

Unbelievable times
But then two unbelievable political outcomes were, for me, very unsettling: the UK voted to leave the European Union and Donald Trump won the US election to become the next President of the United States. Time will tell. Will the people who voted for Brexit and the people who voted for Trump get what they hoped for when they cast their ballot? We’ll look back in ten years and better understand the answer to that question. Time will tell.

More progress was made on LGBTQIA rights in 2016 which, according to the New Testament, would please Jesus

2016 in History
Will 2016 be known historically as the year in which more celebrities died than in any other year?

• Writers: Richard Adams, Edward Albee, Sally Brampton, Anita Brookner, Umberto Eco, Dario Fo, AA Gill, Barry Hines, Carla Lane, Harper Lee, Peter Shaffer, William Trevor, Arnold Wesker
• TV Performers: Caroline Aherne, Sylvia Anderson, Ronnie Corbett, Paul Daniels, Cliff Michelmore, Garry Shandling, Tony Warren, Sir Terry Wogan, Victoria Wood, Sir Jimmy Young
• Musicians: David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Keith Emerson, Greg Lake, Sir Neville Marriner, Sir George Martin, Peter Maxwell Davies, George Michael, Rick Parfitt, Prince, Guy Woolfenden
• Actors: Jean Alexander, Alexis Arquette, Kenny Baker, Patty Duke, Frank Finlay, Carrie Fisher, Zsa Zsa Gabor, George Kennedy, Burt Kwouk, Debbie Reynolds, Alan Rickman, Lord Brian Rix, Andrew Sachs, Sheila Sim, Liz Smith, Peter Vaughan, Robert Vaughn, Gene Wilder, Anton Yelchin
• Cinema giants: Sir Ken Adam, Michael Cimino, Garry Marshall, Douglas Slocombe, Robert Stigwood, Michael White, Vilmos Zsigmond, 
• Sports figures: Muhammad Ali, Johan Cruyff, Arnold Palmer
• World stage, politicians and faith figures: Rabbi Lionel Blue, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Lord Asa Briggs, Fidel Castro, Jo Cox, Zaha Hadid, Nancy Regan, Janet Reno, Margaret Rhodes, Duke of Westminster, Elie Wiesel

Triumphs in spite of Disasters
The competitors who flew to Brazil will no doubt remember 2016 as the Rio Olympics Summer. The people of Cuba may see the year as one in which their country changed its outlook on the world. Barack Obama became the first US President to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Japan. Mission Juno resulted in a spacecraft being placed in a twenty month orbit around Jupiter. Solar power, virtual reality, nanotechnology in surgery and electric cars all made significant technological progress. Ebola was almost eradicated from West Africa and combating the Zika virus saw impressive international cooperation. 70,000 Muslim clerics declared a fatwa against ISIS. Strides were made in cancer treatments, Alzheimer’s research and animal conservation.

What will 2017 bring to the table?

Disasters in spite of Triumphs
Terrorists continue to attempt to disrupt civilisations across Europe, the Middle and Far Easts, Africa and America. The UK lost face (and is continuing to lose face) internationally as a result of the Brexit referendum and the inability of the government to project clarity and consistency in how to “take back control,” as if it ever could in a world of globalization and the internet. Post-truth news became a “thing” (ie making up facts and statistics and promoting lies seems now to be an acceptable strategy for political leaders, fully supported by the majority of the Media.) The Syrian crisis deepened, as did crises in Yemen, the South China Seas and the Korean peninsula. Natural disasters resulted in major death tolls in Ecuador, Italy, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, southeastern USA and Indonesia.

What is now remembered about the 16th year of each century in the past millennium? Can history help us predict which events of 2016 will be remembered in 2116? Time will tell.

1916 

• First World War ongoing: Conscription in Britain, Paris bombings, Battle of Verdun (1 million casualties), the Great Arab Revolt, Battle of the Somme (first use of British tanks, over 1 million casualties) 
• The Easter Rising in Ireland - republican rebellion against British rule in Ireland
• Einstein's Theory of Relativity
• Tristan Tzar's Dada-manifest published in Zurich leading the way to surrealism and absurdity

1816

• Mount Tambora erupts in Indonesia – the Year without a Summer 
• The wreck of The Medusa (French frigate)
  

1716

• First slaves arrive in Louisiana 
• Decree orders all Jews to be expelled from Brussels
  

1616

• Ben Jonson becomes poet laureate and in November his Collected Works are printed 
• Spanish Inquisition delivers an injunction to Galileo 
• Shakespeare and Cervantes both die on 23rd April 
• Pocahontas arrives in England

1516

• Venice creates First Jewish ghetto 
• Ottoman-Malmuk War
  

1416

• Alfonso V (the Magnanimous) becomes King of Aragon 
• Jerome of Prague burned alive as a heretic by Roman Catholic church
  

1316

• The Peace of Fexhe established power sharing between many sectors of society (crown, clergy, nobility and local city governments) 
• French king, Jan the First, rules for only four days before he inconveniently dies
  

1216

• French crown prince Louis enters England at invitation of rebellious barons 
• King John loses the crown jewels in The Wash and dies in October
• Henry III succeeds John and reigns for 56 years, the 4th longest English reign after Elizabeth II, Victoria and George III ("English reign" by counting from 1000 to present time since "British" or "UK" didn't exist for all that time)
  

1116

• China invents the modern stitched-together book

1016

• The Danes defeat the Saxons at the Battle of Ashingdon 
• Canute (Cnut) claims the English throne after the death of Edmund Ironside
  

So how will 2016 be remembered?

Only Time will tell....