Lucy Mangan
Lucy Mangan on the 9 things we should all feel grateful for in 2019
By Lucy Mangan
7 years ago
It’s not always easy to be optimistic at the start of a new year – but, says Stylist columnist Lucy Mangan, there are bright spots in the darkness.
Now, look – no one understands better than me how easy it is to look around this multi-storey s**tplex of a country, this toxic binfire of a reef-destroying, Nazi-nurturing, anti-vaxxing, oversharingworld and find nothing with which to turn to in gleeful anticipation for 2019.
But it behoves us not, this downward dog of mental stances! It behoves us not at all. Let us instead start sifting energetically through the gravelly dross of modern politics, life and whatever else there is and pluck with steady hands the jewels that still gleam – dully, doggedly, but still – amidst the smoke and ashes and let them furnish forth their small lights in the darkness.
That is to say, let’s concentrate on what we have to look forward to this year. Herewith:
1. The second series of Fleabag, penned by and starring the flinty genius Phoebe Waller-Bridge, lands in 2019. If you haven’t seen the first, to the Amazon Prime, to the BBC iPlayer you go.
2. Impeachment of Trump.
3. Brexit finally collapsing under the weight of its own unsustainable madness. I still think there’s a chance. How can there not be? Have you READ the papers? IT’S MADNESS.
4. Renewable energy briefly became the UK’s number one source of power in 2018 for the first time. In your face, global warming! In. Your. Face!
5. Dwarsliggers becoming a ‘thing’ – these are mini books that open top-to-bottom instead of side-to-side. To what end? Nobody knows! But what a delightful notion and even better name, no?
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7. All pro-life men getting vasectomies so that they can be assured with one simple operation that they cannot create any unwanted pregnancies. I have been waiting so long for this very obvious move that I’m assuming 2019 must be the year it happens. See also assorted Tories swallowing their own tongues in shame.
8. Plant based milks – oat and so on – are massively popular, but now investors are really starting to pile into the plant-based meat industry to make it the Next Big Thing, with all the benefits that can bring. As a would-be vegetarian who cannot stand vegetables I am very, very up for this.
9. More money diaries by idiots to boggle at.
Personally, I’m hoping that my athlete’s foot will clear up and that I manage to channel the spirit of a tweet by Alison Moyet earlier this year every day. “I am thankful,” she wrote in September, “for activists both pro and anti-women’s rights. You have focused my mind with your love and your hate. I am officially radicalised.”
Happy new year, everyone. See you at the barricades.
Image: Unsplash / BBC
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