A year when rules no longer applied

We will soon be hanging another year on the line. It’s been soaked, stirred, agitated and spun and possibly at the end of the process, it has shrunk a little to our eye. Next to the faded garment of the year hangs the solo sock of mystery, leaving us scratching our heads wondering from where it came.

There were plenty of sock moments in 2022. It seemed like a mutable year. Everything was up for negotiation and rules no longer applied. History seemed as detached from reality as the Instagram story of a social influencer.

It was a year when we learned that it was not the election result that mattered, it was the after party of insurrection where the action really happened. A year in which all sane observers saw Donald Trump lose his job.

But apparently it did not happen, he was robbed. The end of the year saw, perhaps the motif for 2022, Mr Trump saying if his career was ended by the rules of the constitution, then clearly it is the constitution that has to go. If only Oscar Wilde had the same delusional self-belief he’d probably still be with us, and wallpaper hangers would be dividing their time between his place and Boris Johnson’s.

Job loss can be a sock moment for many. We thought our Prime Minister had lost his job in 2022. We were wrong about that, and it turns out so were all of his colleagues. It was a sock moment for the nation. He, had, in fact, lost five other jobs that almost no one knew to which he had decided to sign up. This was a novel twist on the demarcation disputes of 1970s industrial relations, where keeping everyone in their defined roles was the unions’ objective. This year has seen an incredibly tight employment market, not enough people for the vacancies.

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Perhaps Mr Morrison was showing us the solution to this problem. Perhaps.

Our Queen lost her job in 2022, and her last public function was to greet the new British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who unlike her monarch failed to last longer in office, 44 days, than the shelf life of an iceberg lettuce. The spin cycle of Westminster seemed more like a tumble dryer or a salad spinner.