It does, admittedly, look as if 2017 will be bleak. Donald Trump becomes president, Theresa May has pledged to trigger article 50 by the end of March, and the far right march onwards. Still, it’s not all bad news. There’s the new season of Game of Thrones, apparently high heels are out, and it looks as if publishers may finally stop putting out thrillers with the word “girl” in the title. Here are six more reasons to be cheerful.
Women’s sport takes centre stage
The year looks stellar for women’s big sporting events: 2017 sees the cricket and rugby world cups, and the Uefa Women’s Euro football championship. “The rugby world cup is particularly exciting for England fans because we’re the defending champions,” says Ruth Holdaway, chief executive of Women in Sport. “One of the reasons the cricket world cup is exciting is it’s being held in the UK and people can go and watch the best female cricketers in the world. And again, England are a very good team and there is a real opportunity for them to do very well. In football, the Lionesses did so well at the [2015] world cup, bringing back the bronze medal – doing better than any male team have done since 1966 – so again there is a massive opportunity for them at the Euros.”
The return of the 90s – and beyond
Ah, the 90s. The decade of a Labour landslide, where British identity meant the joy of Britpop, not mean-minded insularity; a world with David Bowie and Victoria Wood still in it, a world where you didn’t find yourself up at midnight wading through hateful misogynistic and antisemitic tweets. The 90s weren’t all great – there was a recession and the Vengaboys were at the height of their musical powers – but the past is a comforting place of certainty. Revisit the decade in 2017 with the sequel to Trainspotting, the Baywatch film, and the return of Twin Peaks. Not nostalgic enough for you? Enjoy a rerun of 80s fashion, and the second season of Netflix’s retro sci-fi series Stranger Things. Pray for a (rumoured) Fleetwood Mac album, and celebrate the homage to the threepenny piece that is the new 12-sided pound coin. By the end of 2017, it may also be worth thruppence.
A new golden age of protest
Donald Trump’s inauguration on 20 January will likely see the first major protests of a year in which the demo could go mainstream. It’s not just in the US – cities around the world will hold solidarity protests. Demonstrations will be held in the UK, including in London, Birmingham and Leeds. On 20 February, the One Day Without Us boycott will see immigrants in the UK, including EU migrants, and their supporters taking the day off work (in lieu of formal strike action) to show how vital their labour is. Then, on 18 March, Stand Up to Racism is staging a demonstration for the UN’s anti-racism day.
A note of caution, though: “I think the periods in which people have been willing to protest and engage tend to be periods in which there was an upward momentum, and a frustration of people being held back,” says Prof Christopher Rootes, director of the Centre for the Study of Social and Political Movements at the University of Kent. “There was an optimism about possibility, but I think [now] people are a bit more pessimistic.” What needs to be done in times like these? “I think the real problem is the rise of post-truth politics and people’s willingness to believe what they want to believe without considering whether there’s any substance to what they’re being told. The challenge is to be relentless in our insistence in calling out lies and misinformation. It’s not so much the fight against fascism as the fight against ignorance.”
The end of the 20-year Cassini space mission
It launched in 1997 and took seven years to get there, but 2017 marks the end of the Cassini spacecraft’s mission to Saturn. Last month, it began its exploration of Saturn’s outer rings. In April, it will swoop between the planet and its innermost ring in the part of the mission Nasa is calling “the grand finale”. There are other exciting space developments to come next year, including the possible launches of powerful telescopes, but there’s something tragic and tender about the demise of Cassini. In September, it will plunge towards Saturn and be vaporised. This is not a galactic commentary on our throwaway society, but a noble sacrifice – scientists don’t want to risk contaminating Saturn’s potentially life-hosting moons with any hardy microbes the craft could be harbouring. We’ve all but destroyed our world, let’s not start on others.
General elections in Europe may put a stop to the rise of the far right
Wishful thinking perhaps, but if Brexit didn’t teach our European friends that the only thing necessary for the triumph of rightwing demagogues is for good people to risk a protest vote, then maybe Trump’s victory will have. First up, the general election in the Netherlands, on 15 March – the far-right Geert Wilders is leading the polls, but we shouldn’t panic yet because, firstly, nobody believes the polls any more, and secondly, he almost certainly won’t become prime minister because the Netherlands has coalition governments and other parties have ruled out working with him.
Likewise, France’s electoral system (in which the winner has to take more than 50% of the popular vote) means it is “extremely improbable”, say observers, that the Front National leader Marine Le Pen will become president in May. Following the Berlin terror attack, immigration looks set to become a main topic in the run-up to Germany’s election later in the year, but despite the rise of a populist anti-immigrant party, Angela Merkel is still widely predicted to hold on to power. Shock victories are so 2016.
Getting lots of sleep
It’s the natural follow-on to all the hygge-ing we did in 2016. You know hygge – the Danish idea of cosiness, which saw us wrapped in flammable blankets while surrounded by lit candles. Arianna Huffington has been going on about the importance of sleep for some time, and now Gwyneth Paltrow is at it. How much sleep you get is the new status symbol (it’s hard to boast about how short your waking hours are when you’re forced to work two jobs). “Make it a priority to be human again,” wrote financial planner and speaker Carl Richards in the New York Times earlier this month, “to work hard and to rest hard without buying into the idea that we’ll fail at life if we rest.” Maybe 2017 won’t seem so bad if we can spend half of it asleep.
• This article was amended on 2 January 2017 to correct the date of the Stand up to Racism demonstration in March.
