JANUARY
The City groans, the suburbs weep and into the dangerous year we leap. The monarch is King Charles III. The Prime Minister is Rishi Sunak. A human turd is found in a sink at the Treasury. I’m just giving you the facts.
In national news, a walrus turns up in Scarborough forcing the council to cancel its fireworks. The international picture is: war in Ukraine and Ethiopia, tensions elsewhere, right-wing nutjobs with weird hair.
Prince Harry releases his memoir and pretty soon everyone has read it except for Harry. Among the revelations: frostbitten penis; losing virginity to randy pub lady; killing c 25 Afghans; taking ayahuasca.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is downloaded by 100m people and everyone gets tremendously excited. How was it for you, ChatGPT? ‘I don’t have feelings or consciousness, so I didn’t experience any emotions when or after I was launched to the public.’ If even ChatGPT feels ambivalence about the future, how are the rest of us supposed to feel?
FEBRUARY
The month opens with the biggest day of industrial action in over a decade. Teachers are on strike, children are everywhere, road and rail chaos. After the high dramas of 2022, a mood of ennui has set in, punctuated by random acts of cruelty.
Lee Anderson floats the reintroduction of the death penalty. Suella Braverman is still dead set on flying refugees to Rwanda. Sir Keir Starmer is just terrified of messing this up.
Crop failures in the Maghreb mean there’s a tomato shortage. In February! What is the world coming to? But lettuce is surprisingly resilient. Former PM Liz Truss argues that her economic policies were never given a chance. It was because the pound was too round. It was because the purges didn’t go far enough.
It was because of what the woke brigade has done to Roald Dahl. Augustus Gloop is on Ozempic now. The Oompa Loompas are being paid reparations. The Grand High Witch is marching around the Home Office, demanding results. Sucks to be you.
MARCH
Ri$hi $unak publishes his tax returns. He has made £4.8 million over the past three years: £410,000 from doing his actual job and £4.4m from ‘investments’, ie, simply being extremely rich already. If only the rest of the country followed his example, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Everything Everywhere All At Once wins all the Oscars and while no one has seen it, everyone feels it, because everything really is happening everywhere all at once.
Everyone is furious about Covid. Everyone is furious about Gary Lineker. The former footballer tweets that the Government’s anti-migrant rhetoric is ‘immeasurably cruel’, which basically makes him just as bad as the Government because governments have feelings too, you know? Match of the Day goes out with no commentary and no analysis. They should try that for the news sometime.
A man in Belgium kills himself after discussing the end of the world with a chatbot named Eliza.
APRIL
We have entered a New Age of Tragedy, says the American foreign policy expert Robert D Kaplan. ‘Tragic thinking encompasses many things, among them the realisation that fear is useful.’
Donald Trump pleads not guilty in one of many trials that if anything increase his chances of being America’s next president. A SpaceX Starship explodes on launch. No one’s on Twitter anymore, it’s all just Elon Musk fanboys tweeting about how white people need to have more babies. Researchers demonstrate that parrots enjoy FaceTiming one another.
MAY
The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. Padam, padam. A baby is born in the UK with three parents. Padam, padam. IBM begins work on a 100,000-qubit quantum computer. Padam, padam. Wind power is now the main source of electricity in the UK. Padam, padam. A Nigerian senator is sentenced to nine years for kidnapping a street vendor and bringing him to the UK for the purposes of procuring his kidney.
The past is still here, and in fact never truly goes away. Heartwarming scenes at the Coronation as the crown is lowered on to Charles III’s splendid bonce. Everyone comments on how strong Penny Mordaunt is, holding that sword. Look at those arms! There’s a big lunch, shortbread, coronation mince, bunting, the lot. A million Percy Pigs are set free down the Mall. While Britain is looking the other way, the World Snooker Championship is won by a Belgian.
Sweden wins the Eurovision Song Contest. Kylie wins pop. Tom wins Succession. Hollywood writers go on strike about AI, residual payments and the fact that everyone just wants ‘second-screen content’ now, ie, stuff you can have on in the background while looking at your phone. All the good TV is Australian now.
In the Aquila constellation, a dying star is observed ingesting a Jupiter-like planet in a single gulp. ‘The other hot Jupiters we have previously studied are being delicately licked and nibbled,’ explains a scientist. ‘This is a different sort of eating.’ This will apparently happen to Earth in 5 billion years.
Padam, padam, I know you want to take me home, padam, padam, and take off all my clothes.
JUNE
Phillip Schofield leaves ITV. Tears will follow. Elton John bows out at Glastonbury. Love Island? Bitter Recriminations Island, more like. Manchester City complete a historic treble and Jack Grealish goes on a month-long bender. Carrie Johnson is a mumfluencer. Gonorrhoea and syphilis at record highs. Only the inheritocracy can afford to live in London now.
Half-hearted coup in Russia. Riots in France. Surprise, surprise, AI image generators are being used to create horrific sexual abuse. The Rwanda plan is ruled unlawful. Enshittification = the tendency for any given platform (Amazon, Google, Twitter, Humans) to become worse over time. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb is convinced he has found evidence of aliens.
JULY
The Barbenheimer publicity war gets way out of hand and Christopher Nolan drops a thermonuclear device on the Barbie house in Malibu. It makes no difference. Greta Gerwig’s movie is the highest-grossing release of the year. What Nolan should have done is get Nicki Minaj to do the theme song.
Harry and Meghan part company with Spotify after failing to dream up any workable podcasts for $20 million. Apparently one of Harry’s ideas was ‘to interview guests like Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump on their childhood trauma to see how they became the people they are today’.
Twitter is now X and everyone migrates to Threads. Big first-day-at-uni vibes, everyone on their best behaviour, like, what A-levels did you do? Remember when the internet was fun? It lasts about an afternoon and everyone goes back to TikTok.
The Sun publishes heavy insinuations about an unnamed BBC presenter who turns out to be Huw Edwards. Poor guy. The longest doctors’ strike in British history begins. Labour has a 25-point poll lead over the Conservatives. Hottest month, globally, on record. Musk challenges Zuckerberg to a cage fight. Seismic activity registered at a Taylor Swift concert.
AUGUST
Summer! There’s a four-fold increase reported in sightings of Red Admiral butterflies. A study reveals you don’t need to walk 10,000 steps a day; 3,967 is fine. For the first time in UK chart history, the top six singles are by solo female artists: Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa, Olivia Rodrigo (x2), Taylor Swift and Peggy Gou. Peggy who? Peggy Gou. Her one goes, like, nanana nanana nanana nanana nanana nanana. It’s all about: status olives, post-liberalism and Guinness as personality.
Spain beat England in the Women’s World Cup and it’s not okay to kiss a colleague on the lips. Russian mercenary Yevgeny Prigozhin is killed in a plane crash. Conductor Sir John Eliot Gardner, 80, is upbraided after smacking a bass singer in the face at a concert in France. Sadiq Khan’s Ulez extension comes into force and the tenor of ranting on suburban forecourts is unbearable.
A 23-year-old called Lily has a profound thought while waiting for a bus in Catford. But she deleted all her social media, so what the hell is she supposed to do with the thought now? Just, like think it? Gross!
SEPTEMBER
Images from the James Webb Space Telescope lead scientists to conclude that everything we thought we knew about the universe is wrong.
Rupert Murdoch retires from News Corp. ‘Yes, he had a terrible force to him, and a fierce ambition, that could push you to the side,’ says Kendall Roy. ‘But it was only that human thing, the will to be, and to be seen, and to do.’ Overheard at a London spa: ‘I did 13 weeks of zero carb, zero sugar and then I had a pain au chocolat and I thought I was dying.’ Who would have imagined that a dog called the American Bully XL would be so aggressive?
The comedian turned ‘Oooh, makes you think’ influencer Russell Brand is accused by four women of rape and sexual coercion, which he vehemently denies, and everyone remembers how toxic the Noughties were. Maybe things are a little better now? The Sugababes reform and so, in time, will Girls Aloud. ‘The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,’ says US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan.
OCTOBER
Jupiter-sized planets are detecting floating around the Orion constellation, untethered from any star. Suella Braverman isn’t having it. She wants them rounded up and flown to Rwanda. She uses her Conservative Party Conference speech to warn of a ‘hurricane’ of migrants about to hit the UK. The weather is in fact unseasonably mild.
Not to be outdone, Rishi Sunak announces the cancellation of HS2 to Manchester in Manchester and wonders why everyone is booing. Lawrence Fox, already banned from GB News, which takes some doing, is arrested ‘on suspicion of conspiring to commit criminal damage to Ulez cameras’.
Hamas terrorists break out of Gaza and into Israel where they murder, torture and kidnap hundreds of innocent people. The death toll is over 1,200, the biggest single act of violence against Jews since the Holocaust. ‘All the places where Hamas hides, operates from — we will turn them into cities of ruins,’ says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. By December the death toll in Gaza will stand at 15,000.
Sir Keir Starmer has glitter thrown over him at the Labour Party Conference. Boris Johnson joins GB News. The pandemic was the ‘wrong crisis’ for him, learns the Covid enquiry. It’s always the wrong crisis.
NOVEMBER
The Fat Bear Winter is upon us. Everyone is totally delulu. Enshittification continues unabated. There are peace marches in London every Saturday now.
Liz Truss appears at the Cenotaph to mark Remembrance Day. If she lives to the age of 97, she will spend more days doing this than she was actually prime minister. Soon-to-be-ex-PM Rishi Sunak interviews Musk about AI at Bletchley Park and comes across like a second-rate podcast host. He does at least sack Suella Braverman.
An interstellar burst — and David Cameron is back to save the universe. Boardroom shenanigans at OpenAI. New Home Secretary James Cleverly refuses to deny he called the Rwanda policy ‘batshit’.
It has become all-too apparent that short of providing an exciting new future, all AI can do is remix the mistakes of the recent past. It has become all-too apparent that short of providing an exciting new future, all the Tories can do is remix the mistakes of the recent past.
Nigel Farage’s bum is glimpsed on I’m a Celebrity. A pause in the Israeli onslaught of Gaza allows for an exchange of hostages. Everyone argues about marbles instead.
DECEMBER
Hey ChatGPT, maybe you could leave us on a more optimistic note?
‘It’s a December to remember in the UK. The nation experiences a cultural and scientific renaissance. Adele and Sir David Attenborough join forces for a charity concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Dr Sarah Patel and Nobel laureate Sir Roger Penrose unveil a game-changing quantum discovery.
Emma Watson and Idris Elba champion environmental causes. Prime Minister Emma Thompson and London Mayor Sadiq Khan amplify eco-causes, urging global collaboration, setting a hopeful tone for a brighter future.’
I’m not particularly reassured by that, to be honest.
‘I understand. In reality, the future is unpredictable, and it can bring a mix of challenges and positive developments. It’s crucial to stay informed through reliable news sources and to actively contribute to the well-being of individuals and the planet.’
Merry Christmas to you, too.
