Thanks a Bunch, 2020

I've seen it suggested that David Bowie was the glue which held the universe together. He died in January, 2016 and we had an extreme right wing game show host running the country by the end of the year so it feels as though there is at least a grain of poetic truth to the claim. From where I've been stood, most of this year has felt very much like the grand finale to that ball of dung we got rolling four years back, with everything having been tainted by association.

Simon Morris died at the end of 2019, as did Carol Childs. Their deaths felt like part of the same shitty process and as such seem to belong to this year in so much as that that's where the shadow has been cast. I loosely knew Simon for two decades on and off. We wrote to each other. I contributed to a few bits of music he did and he contributed to things I'd done. We had a ton of mutual friends. He was found in the River Wyre and it was almost certainly suicide. He was a couple of years younger than I am.

I knew Carol from Maidstone College of Art back in the eighties. We hadn't really kept in touch but then she turned up on facebook as everyone does sooner or later. We'd been good friends at one point. It was cancer.

My wife's grandmother died on January the first. She was in her nineties so it was hardly unexpected, which didn't really make it any easier.

Simon Morgan was killed in a road accident in April, 2020. He worked at Discovery Records in Stratford-upon-Avon when I was a teenager and as such sold me my copy of Never Mind the Bollocks. He was one of the good guys.

Another one of the good guys was Tim Webster who died in July. It was cancer. I'd known him when I lived in Medway and he's present in my best memories of the couple of years I lived there. I still can't quite believe I'm living in a world with no Tim Webster.

Jim Peet died a little after that. I knew him briefly in Maidstone and he was romantically involved with Carol Childs for a while. I'd actually forgotten he'd died but came across mention of him when looking up the timing of Tim Webster's passing on facebook; because the year has been such that it's been possible to forget the deaths of people I didn't know quite so well as I knew others.

The New Year's death of my wife's grandmother coincided with Squidward, our neighbour to the south, upping his campaign against us and our cats. He's an elderly, orange man with too much time on his hands and who regards himself as the sort of person who should probably be living in a better neighbourhood. He knows doctors and dentists, proper people, and he doesn't like cats. This is unfortunate because we run an actual cat colony from our home and are officially licensed to do so by the City of San Antonio. Our cats very occasionally poo in his garden, as do raccoons, opossums, and other neighbourhood critters for which we aren't directly responsible. He tried to take us to court for damage done to one of his beloved automobiles - of which he has three - claiming cats had scratched the paintwork of the car in question and so reduced its value, despite that a cat's claws aren't any more capable of inflicting damage on the paintwork of a car than are my own fingernails. Anyway, we had a fence built between our two houses, not so much to keep the cats on our side as to facilitate our being able to spend time in our garden without having to look at his wrinkled orange carcass or the ludicrous pony tail into which he ties what little hair he has left.

The death of my wife's grandmother and the commencement of hostilities with Squidward additionally coincided with the company changing my wife's conditions of employment, obliging her to work from home. It had seemed like the office petitioned its employees every six months or so, asking who wanted to work from home because it was the way forward and they could make great savings on the office space. Some liked the idea but most didn't. Eventually the company got tired of waiting for everyone to change their minds and told them they would be working from home. My wife wasn't happy about it. In fact, it would be fair to say that she was extremely unhappy about it.

Of course, it also meant she was a couple of months ahead of the curve when the global pandemic hit and we all had to work from home. It's a year later, and she's acclimated to working from home, but I wouldn't say she's changed her mind about the idea. Unlike myself, she's very much a social animal and doesn't do well during long periods of either isolation or solitude.

Fluff died in February. He was our oldest cat and was about ten. He had cancer and had been in decline for a couple of months. We had to have him put down and it tore my fucking heart out.

Charlie, our rabbit died in October. We'd taken him to be neutered because we'd been given a female rabbit, rescued from someone's garden. Three days later, it seemed like he wasn't doing so well. My wife took him to the emergency vet in the middle of the night and he was dead by the morning. Maisie, the female rabbit, passed about a week ago. She was about eight months old and had evidently been having a rough time when someone found her in their garden, and then gave her to us. It took her about a month to recover, to begin to seem healthy. She had a couple of good weeks, then went into decline again. The vet took an x-ray and suggested that it was a miracle she had survived so long. She hadn't been born right. Her insides were all wrong and she was never going to have a long life to any sort of standard, which is probably why she'd been dumped and ended up in someone's garden. She was beautiful.

I have no fucking words for any of this shit.

Justin, our neighbour two houses to the north, got out of prison in June. He'd done five years, or possibly four, for abuse of a senior, whatever that means. I date his return to the time when I began to notice stray dogs in our street, because Justin likes dogs. From what I can tell, Justin's animal care entails feeding table scraps to dogs he either obtains or steals from somewhere, then letting them roam the street at all other times. Justin suffers from schizophrenia and learning difficulties. Also, he's a fucking arsehole, a judgement I quantify by adding that I've known plenty of schizophrenics in my time and plenty of people with learning difficulties, and there aren't many of them whom I feel I could justifiably call fucking arseholes.

Justin's mania manifests as voices in his head, or occasionally as hallucinations. He terrorises the neighbourhood, breaking into people's yards, spending an hour sat on our porch at 2AM, attempting to kick our front door in one Sunday afternoon, smashing bottles in the road outside our house causing me to puncture the tires of my bike. The cops main concern seems to be that we don't do anything to upset him. His mother refers to him as a sweet boy after telling us about long telephone conversations when Justin was in prison during which he made repeated threats to kill her, over and over and over.

I also date the disappearance of three of our cats to around the same time that Justin came home - Grace, Holly, and Bean. Grace and Holly had been with us for at least five years. Bean was a baby, about a year old. They were generally settled and we loved them, although Holly seemed to have found a second home somewhere else and would occasionally stay away for several days at a time. Grace, by way of contrast, didn't seem to spend much time outside, preferring either the cat tree in the corner of the living room or my sock drawer.

Bean was one of four kittens rescued from a different crazy neighbour with a cat who had never been spayed. He was the smallest, the runt, all black and half the size of the others when we took them all in. Bess was terrified that he wouldn't make it, but he seemed pretty feisty to me and we made sure he got plenty of cat milk. He came to regard me as daddy and provided much comfort after Fluff died. Even at a year old, he was a small cat, and he spent almost every evening sat on my chest, obliging me to slouch back into the couch. He even smelled amazing. My wife has told me about that baby smell thing which some mothers experience with their newborn children, and somehow I had something similar with Bean. I loved that cat more than anything.

Then, one Monday about a week since I'd noticed Justin's latest doomed pair of stray dogs hanging around the street, Grace, Holly and Bean all failed to show up for breakfast on the same day, and haven't been seen since - now six months ago. We've had cats go off the radar before, but not usually our cats - those who live with us in the house - and never three of them all at the same time. We had yet another new kitten turn up at the beginning of the year, so it's possible they may have been disgruntled by her arrival, and there are all sorts of potential explanations which aren't horrible and which don't involve dogs, traffic, our cat-hating neighbour to the south, or our schizophrenic one to the north, but it's hard to get past the statistic of all three vanishing at the same time. I tell myself they probably found good homes, somehow, or at least that I don't know for absolutely certain that anything horrible came of them.

The new kitten who turned up at the beginning of the year was small and grey. We'd seen her in the street and mistaken her for Grace, who was likewise small and grey. It was obvious she'd been abandoned but we couldn't get near her. We left food out but watched her getting skinnier and skinnier as the weeks went by. Then one Saturday she ran up to us, meowing her head off as we stood in the front yard. She was skin and bone. We took her in and fed her, and she improved but slowly. We named her Professor Jiggly after a cat in a popular meme which had been doing the rounds on social media, or Jiggly for short. Then after about a month she dramatically coughed up what looked like a chicken's shoulder blade. We suddenly understood her failure to thrive and she at last developed an appetite, growing into a big, beautifully rounded, grey cat with the loudest, most persistent meow you've ever heard.

Another month after Grace, Holly and Bean disappeared, Jiggly also failed to show up at feeding time and hasn't been seen since.

All through this, all the while we were running up to a presidential election which really felt as though it was going to be the last. Those claiming to be in the know suggested that there was no way Trump could win a second term, but they had said the same thing first time around and I wasn't going to get my hopes up. We'd had a year of bullshit and a killer disease running riot with a president who believed it was all a hoax because someone had told him so and that was the version of the story he preferred; and George Floyd was murdered by those sworn to protect and serve, with all the usual Trumpanzees parroting how cops have such a hard job and need our support and anyway maybe George Floyd had kinda sorta deserved it as you would realise if you were prepared to do your research. I watched half the country reveal themselves to be bitter, mean-spirited, selfish, barely literate, racist children crawling over one another for the privilege of being first to polish master's apple while claiming these flaws as somehow representing strength of character, a form of courage even; and I say that as someone who understands why people might despise the left, because I too occasionally despise elements of the left for the exact same reason, but I'm not so fucking stupid as to mistake passing resentments for a pseudo-spiritual calling.

I've lost track of what Trump actually did this year, or what he failed to do, because there was some fresh example of his failure as a human being occurring about three or four times a week. He identified people who don't like fascism as the enemy at some point, which you would think might be a bit of a giveaway. I'm sure I remember him jovially calling for acts of physical violence against his liberal opponents, just like with Mussolini and the castor oil. I know it wasn't this year, but he never did get around to openly condemning the Ku Klux Klan - all of which cult members will denounce as either fake news, or a courageous example of free speech, or a side issue and a distraction because just look at how great the economy is doing, providing you don't take too much notice of anyone who actually understands the economy.

I spent most of the year expecting the worst, and that the worst would be followed by an indefinite suspension of the democratic process in order to somehow secure freedom by preventing the election of anyone politically to the left of Adolf Hitler. Suddenly there would be more Proud Boys on the streets of our cities, possibly working in conjunction with the cops. I didn't really expect the knock in the middle of the night, just looking for dangerous liberals, communists, or anyone who ever read a book, but then I didn't really expect the repulsive orange fascist to be elected president in the first place. About a month ago, I learned how to handle and fire a handgun. Biden had already won the election, but the fact remains that half the country voted for Dorito Benito, having lived through the first four years of his presidency and apparently thought it was just fine. I've really come to dislike the human race this year.

I'm still alive at the end of 2020, and I don't have cancer to the best of my knowledge. Others have had it much worse, but it has nevertheless been an unusually shitty year.

Hopefully, the only way left is up.