2021 was another year in which I ended up getting through quite a lot of ink. While I’ve posted a lot of it on social media at one point or another, it’s nice to have a bit of a round-up, and there were also a few scribbles that for one reason or another never got posted.
I’ve added some little notes around the cartoons because many of them related to the news, and these days who can keep up with what happened last month, let alone last year?
Anyway, I began the year, as so many did, with high hopes for 2021, at least as compared to 2020.
Alas, it was not quite the blinder I’d hoped for, but at least I had plenty of inspiration for drawings from the news, current affairs, and insufferably smug memes.
Pandemic culture remained a rich seam.
Our salvation, of course, was the extraordinary vaccine programme. Like all the other sheeple, I had mine and was very grateful to Bill Gates, the Illuminati, the Bilderberg Group, and the many well-meaning volunteers who made their dastardly agenda possible. I don’t know what all the fuss was about – I didn’t have any side effects at all…
Like most, I was delighted when Boris told us that we had to tough it out a little longer, but that all restrictions would finally be lifted on ‘Freedom Day’, 19 July.
Living as I do in a seaside town, a summer where no-one could go to Faliraki was a bit of a struggle, but fortunately there were a few 90-minute windows of peace, courtesy of the Euros.
Our national capacity for self-sabotage being as it is, as the pandemic began to recede, we were then hit by a ‘pingdemic’ as our batshit track and trace app started doing more economic damage than the actual virus.
The powers-that-be refused to reduce the sensitivity of the app, so we all just deleted it instead. It seemed, however, that our woes were not over, and the short-lived petrol crisis was an odd and entirely avoidable exercise in the herd mentality that we have come to enjoy these past couple of years.
Elsewhere in the news, Wallis and Edward – sorry, Meg and Harry – went on Oprah, and the whole country pretended not to watch it.
Unlike last year, I didn’t draw many caricatures, but I did decide at one point that if anyone was more fed up than me of seeing Alex Salmond on the news, it must surely be Wee Nicky Sturgeon.
Lastly, in a year where so many greats passed on, there was one funeral service that I found myself wondering about.
As usual, though, most of my cartoons were just cheap gags. Perhaps one day I will release a line of supermarket greetings cards.
The modern world seems to have been quite a frustration, but perhaps I am just becoming old and curmudgeonly.
Finally, there were our animal friends, who I am always careful not to humanise.
Wishing you all a very happy 2022.
