Susie O’Brien: An A-Z of all the forgettable things about 2020

From Donald Trump to remote learning and Zoom catch-ups — 2020 has been a year filled with moments we don’t want to remember.

2020 is a year we won’t forget but don’t want to remember.

Footballers played to cardboard cutouts, opera singers performed to plants and we argued over the name of the Macca’s Parmi burger. (For the record, it should be Parma.)

We had fire, floods and travel restrictions. And a 103-year-old lady who toasted beating corona with a Bud Light beer, proving age is no barrier to bad taste.

This year we ate, we drank and we home schooled our children. We often also home schooled our children while we drank.

Here’s an A-Z to help you remember all the forgettable things about 2020.

The North Face jacket was worn by two famous faces in 2020.

A is for Daniel Andrews who finally appears to have hung up his weekend press conference North Face jacket — a move that has led to his highest poll numbers in years.

B is for Brexit, which was more important — but less interesting — than the Duchess of Sussex’s Megxit.

C is for Corona — the beer, not the disease, that took a hit during the pandemic.

D is for the dumb Americans who stopped drinking the beer because they didn’t want to catch the disease.

Gal Gadot singing Imagine with other stars was a cringefest. Picture: You Tube

E is for Eminem, the potty-mouthed rapper who nonetheless manage to shock us by releasing an album called “Music to get murdered by”.

F is for famous people like actor Gal Gadot who tried to inspire us with how grateful they feel to be healthy and wealthy during the pandemic.

G is for a $75 Gwyneth Paltrow GOOP candle called “This smells like my vagina”. It didn’t, but that didn’t matter. It was a bestseller anyway..

H is for Helensburgh Anglican Church’s billboards. One read: 1. Jesus is Awesome. 2 We have toilet paper. That led to their biggest attendance in years.

I is for Instagram influencers who were so dumb they boasted about breaking lockdown rules online then wondered why they got caught.

J is for jokes. I’d tell you a joke about the coronavirus, but I don’t want to spread it around.

K is for American rapper Kanye West who released a range of slides that looked like grated Swiss cheese melting on your foot. They were a runaway success.

L is for lockdown — a time when our streets were empty, our bellies were full and we watered the garden in our dressing gowns rather than battled peak hour traffic.

M is for Scott Morrison, who learnt one important thing this year — it’s barre, not barr-ay.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison finally learnt how to pronounce barre properly.

N is for no. This was the year we were told no, you can’t have a beer, no, you can’t have a Bunnings sausage, no, you can’t kiss your grandma. Some things we missed, some we didn’t.

O is for the Ocean Spray-drinking skateboarder who got 50 million TikTok views by lip synching to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” while skating down a hill.

P is for US President Donald Trump, who was the only person in the US who couldn’t believe that not every other person voted for him.

Q is for Victoria’s quarantine hotels, where COVID-positive people were allowed to roam the streets and guards stayed inside getting horny with the inmates. That’s not how it was meant to work.

R is for remote learning — which involved kids pretending to study while they turned off their laptop cameras and watched Netflix instead.

Bye bye, Donald Trump.

S is for scientists with sex appeal. Brett Sutton and Andrew Cuomo were feted like pop stars, with fervent discussions about their nipples, hair styles and how hot they looked in their 20s.

T is for Tiger King. We couldn’t get enough of the tales of Tiger Joe, who’s worked hard to Make America Exotic Again.

U is for us. For surviving A, M and P this year. (see letters above)

V is for Annaliese van Diemen, who wisely deleted Twitter after sending ill-timed tweets about Captain Cook. She didn’t resign but no one trusted her to run press conferences afterwards.

W is for woke — the name given to pretentious people who care more about being seen to care about social issues than the issue itself. Also see Y.

Brett Sutton finishes 2020 with a cult-like following.

X is for the Xbox Series X — the biggest, most popular present kids want for Christmas that sold out everywhere six months ago. Sorry kids, but that’s $500 saved.

Y is for members of Gen Y who blame the rest of us for climate change, global pandemics and for not getting our grey roots touched up often enough.

Z is for Zoom, the virtual platform that gave us a new way to keep in touch with people we won’t bother catching up in real life now.

Roll on 2021 ...

Susie O’Brien is a Herald Sun columnist

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@susieob