Well, it’s certainly been a year hasn’t it. 2021 has brought with it unique quirks that humankind has never endured before: seeing a man shove a flare up his butt to celebrate England’s football success, for a start. As we finish off this year (with perhaps less of a bang than we thought two months ago) it’s time to look back on the year-defining experiences we’ll always remember the past 12 months by.
- Attending the first freezing cold park meet up with six people.
- Not knowing what to do when spotting a group of seven having a picnic.
- Mastering the art of balancing takeaway food on bins.
- Power-walking across a park to reach the nearest public toilet… only to find it shut.
- Going to a ‘seated outdoor club’ that’s actually a picnic bench in a wind tunnel.
- Having an 11am pint for the pub reopening because all the pubs had been booked weeks in advance.
- Running out of storage on your phone because you’ve downloaded 25 different order-to-table apps.
- Having to just go up to the bar anyway because the app is incredibly glitchy and for some reason you can’t use Monzo on it.
- Being at your first gig back and being surprised at how bloody loud it is!
- Finally going to a gig you booked in 2019 and realising you don’t really like the artist any more.
- Returning to festival toilets after a year off and being too disgusted to use them.
- Being caught in the Catch-22 of not being able to go into a shop and buy a mask because you forgot your mask.
- Complaining at the unfairness of being pinged.
- Finding some sort of self-justification to turn off your Bluetooth to avoid being pinged.
- Immediately forgetting what pinging was as soon as it stopped being a thing.
- Realising that being pinged was actually a great excuse to get out of things and that you miss it.
- Tweeting ‘BIMINI WAS ROBBED’.
- Then tweeting ‘KITTY SCOTT CLAWS WAS ROBBED’ six months later.
- Getting far too emotionally involved in the ‘FREE BRITNEY’ campaign.
- Getting far too emotionally involved in Meghan and Harry’s Oprah interview.
- Spending literally hours of your life looking at pictures of Jack Grealish’s calves.
- Perhaps entertaining the lads with a cheeky little arse flare.
- Googling ‘what is an NFT’.
- Genuinely freaking out when it became legal for strangers to sit next to you.
- Realising sweaty clubs smell really bad?!
- Deciding to grow curtains and/or a mullet after doing a 2020 buzz cut.
- Cancelling all the subscriptions you set up in 2020.
- Except Beer52 because the nice old man on the line offered you a free book if you stayed.
- Seriously thinking about getting a dog but then ultimately not getting a dog.
- Being forced to admit to yourself that watching football in empty stadiums is shit.
- Forwarding that Streets’ song ‘Who’s Got The Bag’ to your friends.
- Forwarding Munya Chawawa’s Matt Hancock parody video to all your friends.
- Getting hooked on It’s A Sin.
- Getting hooked on Squid Game.
- Realising you have a sordid little crush on one of the Succession boys.
- Realising you would probably die for Adele?
- Going to six delayed pandemic weddings in the space of a month.
- Going to a club a month after having Covid and feeling invincible against the virus for the first time in a year.
- ‘Is it Covid or am I hungover?’
- ‘Is it Covid or is it the monster cold?’
- Coughing on the bus when you know it’s 100 percent the monster cold and wanting to tell your concerned fellow passengers.
- Getting super-excited for human contact then realising you’ve lost the ability to communicate.
- Panicking that your lateral flow test will be positive and you can’t go out.
- Feeling suddenly knackered because of All The Socialising and panicking that the going out was too much to handle.
- Desperately scrambling to find your Covid pass at the front of the queue for the club while a masked bouncer loses patience with you.
- The same but at the airport.
- Failing to go on holiday because you didn’t fill in 32 forms.
- Successfully going on holiday and filling in 32 forms no one subsequently asked for.
- Realising you’ve been doing lateral flows wrong for the past two years and you’ve been swabbing the dangly bit at the back of your throat.
- Realising some meal kits expect you to actually breadcrumb and deep-fry your own goujons.
- Realising some meal kits expect that you have more than four hob rings.
- Having five million versions of the ‘did you get Pfizer?’ ‘no Moderna’ conversations.
- Having five million versions of the ‘aren’t those Amazon supermarkets?’ conversation.
- Being cancelled on by an Uber
- Being cancelled on by a Bolt.
- Not even realising the Olympics was on.
- Looking guiltily at the £30 ‘clay kit’ you bought last year knowing it will never be used.
- Deleting Strava from your phone.
- Deleting Couch to 5k.
- Feeling totally and utterly exhausted and like Christmas can’t come soon enough.