Last year ended with Britain just about on the floor, pummelled by a relentlessly inauspicious news cycle. The country teetered on the brink of a no-deal Brexit, and to top it off Kent had somehow become the new Wuhan, with the freshly identified Alpha variant laying waste to Christmas and far more besides.
Despite its miserable start and uncertain finale, there’s no doubt 2021 has been an improvement on its predecessor. Prodigious vaccines arrived. Holidays were taken, grandparents were hugged and families reunited. Festivals were held, theatres reopened and proper football returned. But we are still trapped in a pandemic few of us ever expected to drag on quite this long, and what we used to think of as normality remains frustratingly out of reach.