There seems to be some nostalgia for 2016 at the moment. It mostly seems to be about the music of 2016, but apparently it’s also because people have started putting filters on their TikTok videos like we used to with Instagram photos in 2016.
I did a review of 2016 at the time, so you can read that, I suppose. 10 years ago, our 10-year-old was, well, a newborn baby, and so whilst they were born in 2015, most of the first year of their life fell in 2016. So it was quite a memorable year for us in that sense.
2015 had been a big year – we’d bought a house, I passed my driving test and bought a car, and we became a family of three. So 2016 was more of a consolidation year, with Christine on maternity leave for the first half (and me having the whole of January off on paternity and annual leave). I changed jobs twice – securing a secondment doing timetabling in early February, and then moving to a new permanent role in August. I’m (essentially) still in that role now.
Our house that we bought in 2015 was (and to some extent still is) a work in progress, and so in 2016 we had a downstairs bathroom installed, along with a new boiler and a Nest thermostat – our first piece of smart home technology. And despite having a small child, we did manage some trips – I went to London twice, we had an overnight trip to Liverpool, we went to see two friends get married up near Durham and had a day out in Oxford.
The photo at the top is a then-and-now comparison; not having a newborn means I’m less tired, but I’m a little wider nowadays and need to wear glasses. Also, there’s quite the difference between the front facing camera on the iPhone 5S (2016) and the iPhone 13 Mini (2026).
So on the whole, at least for us, it was a good year. Although the Brexit referendum, Trump’s first election and all the celebrities who died that year were less good outcomes.