Windsor Christmas Lights and a bit of a rant about 2022

As mentioned previously we did manage to do a third set of Christmas lights and like the previous two, it rained! The lights themselves were OK, out of all three sets I have to say the ones we preferred the most were the ones in the Botanical Gardens in Malaga, but they have had a few years of practice!

 

2022 (aside from three sets of Christmas lights all in the rain) went down in history for so many things, frankly a lot of them not good and just when we all thought the world would improve after 2020 and 2021. 

 

Sadly it was a lot of the same, sure travel was easier, but the war in Ukraine drove up energy prices where so many people in the world are essentially in fuel poverty (when a household spends more than 10% of there income on fuel costs), politics in the UK was a total car crash and as result it has made a bad economic situation worse. It is clear large parts of the world will be in recession in 2023 and sadly my country of birth apart from Russia has the lowest predicted economic growth of the G20 and is the only member of the G7 whose economy is smaller than before the pandemic. We shouldn't kid ourselves a large part of this (4%) is down to the suicidal decision to exit the EU. The UK also exited 2022 closer than the 1930s to a general strike and definitely heading to a "Winter of Discontent".

Russia continues to commit war crimes in Ukraine and the sad truth is that the war in Ukraine will likely continue for years and become a proxy NATO vs Russia conflict, back to the days of the Cold War of proxy NATO vs Warsaw Pact. The rest of the world outside the UK has its challenges, US politics continues to be as divisive as ever with a number of countries such as Spain, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Finland (to name but a few) have some degree of national elections this year which will bring with it I'm sure the worst behavior in some people. The UK doesn't have to have one until 2025 as the Johnson government abolished the fixed term Parliament Act, sadly.

On top of that we lost some great people in 2022, from Mikael Gorbachev to Queen Elizabeth II, the best list I've seen of them is here.

Anyway on a slightly happier note I've shared within this some of the pictures of our trip to the Windsor Christmas lights.

 Happy New Year everyone lets hope 2023 is a step up.