Where were we when the bells rang out for the last New Year? In a better place, that’s for sure. Looking forward to getting the buzz back after the pandemic, to raucous good times and travel to the wild blue yonder, feeling the love with family and friends, progress on waiting lists in health and housing, right?

Well, maybe those last two are a bit far-fetched. But things were looking up.

When the Russian navy took to the broad Atlantic to mess with our buzz – and who knows what underwater cables? – we were annoyed. But worse was to follow. Much worse. They went to war – and we were all rightly salted and pickled. The Rooskies included.

So much for the bells.

Were it not for Putin’s imperial adventuring and the stubborn, ingenious resistance of Ukrainians we’d have been talking climate now, because signs of an apocalypse are everywhere.

It has been another record-breaking year of fire, flood, pestilence, drought, starvation, ice-caps and glaciers melting, seas rising.

And this, more than the war, is what preoccupies people living in the southern hemisphere. Asia has its own worries, China being one.

It may well be that in a thousand years our descendants, if we have any, will remember Putin’s folly as the hinge of history where the industrial west finally and truly resolved to turn green, the better to free themselves from the petro-tyrants of the steppes and the deserts.

Or that, with the defeat of Bolsonaro, the tide turned for the Amazon, the earth’s last great rainforest lung. We live in hope.

Here’s the thing:, change can come out of nowhere, just when you least expect it. Ask Elon Musk.

A year ago who’d have thought that hubris would hurtle Big Tech and crypto oligarchs back towards earth, their astral ambitions laid low by absurd wealth and monstrous egos? But these remain abstractions for very many of us. Housing, health and childcare were at the forefront of concern in 2022, joined by sharp rises in the cost of living.

As the pandemic was carefully folded into a file in the Department of Health, pent-up demands in general medical care, surgical waiting lists and screening programmes burst forth.

It’s one crux after another – staff shortages in education, health and construction. Blockages in planning processes. Oops, there’s another leak yonder. And another.

The membrane between compassion and indifference is thin. The pressure on accommodation and energy supplies is acute and a highly-strung population may find their better instincts tested. That membrane will be stretched this winter.

A storm’s raging. A hard rain is falling.

We’ll don our warmest clothes, we’ll sup hot drinks, we’ll batten down the hatches.

We’ll soldier on. Out of 2022 and into the future...

Read the full Hog in the new Annual 2022 issue, out now.