Séamas O’Reilly on the highs and lows of 2021

Our optimism about this year was perhaps due to how low our expectations were coming out of 2020, a year which now sits in our memory like Avatar, a mediocre film everyone seemed legally required to attend, only to avoid remembering any time after. Picture: Edwin Hooper/Unsplash

There’s a game my wife and I like to play called Reeling. It’s not a constant pursuit in all our waking hours, but rather one of those long-play amusements whose goals appear from the ether when we haven’t been thinking about it for weeks. And those goals are thus: as we enjoy our deadening nightly scroll through current events, we must isolate precisely those moments of the news which we feel sure will feature on ...