My annual year in review will be here shortly (see above). I did not bother writing one in 2020.  I struggled in 2021.  Music, film, sport, theatre, the arts, culture, collaboration, fellowship, singing, worship, fun…all became at various points in the past 20-months, initially ill-advised, then banned, made illegal under emergency legislation, with public objections and protests ignored, then repressed ‘regime-style’ with fines, arrests, and prosecutions, while the mainstream media sneered from the suburbs and the politicians sat in Downing Street quaffing cheese and sipping Beaujolais.

This was not some dystopian sci-fiction novel, but the reality of the public-policy response of numerous governments around the world and, inexplicably now again in late 2021, the approach of the UK Governments. I am hopeful that when the critical gaze of history and hindsight looks back on 2020/21, it will not be a write-up of heroic vaccine roll-outs and the billions spent on furlough; the key conclusion will be the abject failure of public institutions, governments, and vain politicians to see the ‘bigger picture’ beyond COVID-19 and their sheer narrow-minded obliviousness to the plainly obvious and unforeseen consequences of lockdowns, enforced social-dislocation, and the innumerable health and mental-health harms that sledgehammer policy responses create.  Perhaps as we end 2021, the newspapers might slowly start to smell the horrendous consequences of their own obsequies. In the UK, there were 223 child deaths, including that of tragic Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, reported by social services departments across the country between April 2020 and March 2021. Meanwhile, 6 (six) under 18s with “no underlying health conditions” died from Covid-19 in England in the same period. By any measure, a criminal neglect of vulnerable children, while the politically blinkered prioritised the ‘protection’ of the vast majority with little or no chance of being harmed by the virus. Please don't judge the veracity of my argument on the basis of my probable ignorance, there are innumerable sources of scientific and alternative commentary that say that the rich, the middle-class, the professionals and the public sector civil servants have largely been beneficiaries of lockdowns, hybrid working, financial bailouts. The poor, the vulnerable and the isolated (particularly the very youngest and most elderly) have been irreparably harmed.

If anything, 2021 proved the vital importance of “elsewhere”. The poet Philip Larkin put it beautifully: “Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home, Strangeness made sense.”  Like Larkin, we might not skip with joy through the streets of elsewhere, but we make better sense of our thoughts and feelings whilst there. When our surroundings are less familiar, the unfamiliar sights and sounds provide a different context, and we look up more – at the sky, not the pavement. The absence of elsewhere could not have been felt more profound than in 2021.  Despite military scale vaccines rollouts, social distancing, mask-wearing and the omnipresent smell of hand sanitiser, most citizens in the UK (and around the world) simply stayed put – isolated at home, not venturing elsewhere, for the first half of 2021.  I went onto the Campus of London Business School about four times in the first part of the year.  The School quad was sign-posted with one-way systems, designed it seemed for the benefit of the tumbleweed that trundled across the path. If I had anything social had been pre-booked, it was cancelled.  If I wished to go abroad, then I was either prohibited by some red/amber/green nightmare list of rules, or I was threatened with confinement on entry by the same bureaucratic variable nonsense in the destination of choice.  Friends, colleagues, and clients around the world were similarly locked-in, prohibited from escaping the familiar for the less familiar.  Somehow, policy makers decided that endemic viruses would respect borders and turn back when they saw the officious border guards. The policy, as we knew then and know now, was akin to the pompous vanity of King Canute’s entourage – encouraging him to hold up his hand to the waves and expecting that they would simply recede.

After a brief glimmer of hope, tantalisingly teased by the UK Government in August, we end the year under renewed mask mandates, work from home orders, vaccine passports, closed borders, entertainment and hospitality on its knees, and with the ever-present threat of a new lockdown in the offing. The media fuels a putative public debate about enforced vaccination of citizens and the mandated unemployment and ostracism of those hesitant to be jabbed. It is as if, during the steepest and most profound learning curve in post-War history, our governments and leaders have learnt nothing at all.   Whatever the modellers and epidemiologists say, the reality is that no one really knows how the pandemic will pan out, but policy makers know with certainty that more kids will be harmed and abused, their education and social skills will suffer, and others, like poor Arthur, will be killed by further lockdowns.  Surely in 2022, the governments and their learned advisors much change tact? I hope.