A January Best Forgotten?

2020. What a start we’ve had. From wild bush fires to the death of a basketball legend, January has been a broiling pot of tensions, fears and unfortunate issues that have culminated in a perceived public desire to escape and return to simplicity.

I was sat on the Tube yesterday, on my way back from a weekend visit to my family, when I saw a young mother and her two daughters, just sat there, thumbing through the Evening Standard’s Gossip page. Clearly the allurement of Social Media isn’t as present in young people as it used to be. Pictures of devastation following the Terrorist ‘incident’ last week and the terrorist’s face plaster the front cover…

And yet the family doesn’t discuss it, they all pour over the suit a an actress was wearing. What matters here is that London is, as it always has been, moving. Still quietly observing but none-the-less, moving at its usual brisk pace. The rise of the hashtag #Londonisopen following Britain’s departure from the E.U. is confirmation of this, the desire of the many hundreds of thousands of people that live in the city that life will continue to go on in the face of the most adverse problems to date. Whether they be political, social or international, the British Metropolis is still ‘open for business’ to use the Australian Open chair’s phrase following Djokovic’s win on Sunday.

With greater problems on the horizon already in terms of the Wuhan Virus, economic uncertainty in the transition period for the U.K., and an extreme rise in the far right’s control of the political landscape, we need to maintain our own stand against the aggressors, who or what ever they may be. We need certainty, we need stability and while we currently have neither, the things we do have is ourselves and our minds. That’s something nobody can take away from us. We are and will remain ‘Great Britain’ in 2020, even if it doesn’t feel like it and while one month is already over, there is a great deal of time to still make it your year and even, your decade.