To ring in the New Year (and decade!) BTSB invites you to look away from the future ahead of us and turn back to 2009! How did the last spin around the sun fare against the others?

Looking back, 2009 seems to have been a bleak year indeed. The news were full of reports about the world wide recession, global warming and of course, that fearsome pestilence swine flu. But it wasn’t all bankruptcies, eschatological visions and flu fear mongering, and although wars continued to be fought in all the places we have grown to expect them to be fought, but I guess there were good times, too.

In 2009, people tweeted. I didn’t, because I have yet to figure out what the attraction is in reading SMS-length little snippets of what Ashton Kutcher had for dinner. Homing was the hot thing, and when we all weren’t out pickling mushrooms in our grandmas’ rubber boots, we were carrying around our own porcelain teacups and wearing baggy Hammer pants, as was the custom at the time. Finland’s biggest ever news event came around in August when Madonna came by and bought hotpants.

You might remember 2009 as the year the Grim Reaper reaped some of humanity’s finest with his grim reaping equipment. An overwhelming wave of grief swept over the world in June when the world’s love-hate relationship with Michael Jackson came to an abrupt end. The tacky media circus that ensued captivated people’s imaginations and spurred numerous tribute events. There was moonwalking aplenty, but what happened to all the dirty dancing and feathered hair in memory of Patrick Swayze and Farrah Fawcett? Oh yeah, Lévi-Strauss and Pinter died, too.

Perhaps 2009 was the year you got your proverbial tie-dyed knickers in a twist and took to the barricades? There was a lot to protest, after all: new university legislation, global warming, nobody giving a crap about global warming, global warming being a hoax East Anglians came up with just to spite us, Helsinki looking to the east for some more lebensraum, the nonexistent corruption in Finland, and of course, Taylor Swift’s MTV Video Music Award.

Obviously a lot went on in politics in ‘09, but what everyone will remember is Obama taking over in the US, and the biggest load of pressure placed on one man in the history of the entire world. Being given the most prestigious lifetime achievement award there is less than a year into your new job seems like a nice, stress-free way to kick off a new decade. In Finland it turned out that sometimes even politicians can lie.

In this first issue of the first year of the decade we invite you to have your say: What do you most remember from 2009? Did you go in for fads, what were the cultural highlights of your year? How will it go from here, how do you think 2010 will compare? Discuss!

Please leave your comments below, or I’ll be forced to post pictures of my Croatian island getaway and these really pretty cupcakes I made last year.