These fifty two weeks
are all the time we can own;
value the New Year.
-- Haiku for January 2014 No.1
2022 was a difficult year. I had Covid early in the year, then after I got over that I ended up in an ambulance after falling over and hitting my head. On the national scene, there were disastrous floods all around the country (though my home town was spared) and in the elections we had a change of government; the right wing were right out and the left wing were left in office. There was inflation, soaring power prices and shortages of all sorts of things.
Some of this was to do with world events. Who would have thought we'd have an honest-to-goodness shooting war in Europe, but that's what we got when the Russians went into Ukraine. This affected supplies of oil, gas and wheat to the rest of the world. China meanwhile was having its own problems, but to paraphrase an old saying, when China gets a cold, we start sneezing.
The Queen died, which didn't shock me as much as I would have expected, because the previous night I spoke to my friend Keith on the phone. He had been listening to the BBC radio news and said that reading between the lines they had been saying Her Majesty's health was concerning. So the next morning I was mentally prepared to some extent when the news came over the radio.
Locally, Sue Neill-Fraser completed 13 years of her life sentence for murder and successfully applied for parole. Sue isn't a friend, but she knew my sister and I recall meeting up with her in the car park at our local supermarket. Her trial was controversial, and I know of no other case where somebody was convicted of killing her husband despite there being no body, no witnesses and no murder weapon.
I remember hearing someone say the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse symbolised Famine, War, Pestilence and Death. Having lived through the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam and AIDS, I had not expected to hear those hoofbeats in the distance again in my lifetime.
Here's something I wrote on a Christmas card last year. Maybe it's applicable to all of us.
This year, may you be healthier, wealthier and happier than you were in the previous year.
