Dancing on the lip of a volcano

Every year has its stand-out image. Until a few weeks ago I thought that image for 2006 would be the first television shots of Austrian kidnapee Natascha Kampusch, who freed herself after eight years in captivity. Or Donald Rumsfeld taking his leave of power after the American people roused themselves from slumber to doze. But there are so many.

Picture this: a forlorn sandal, stripped from its owner and lost in a crazed stampede at the Saudi haj as pilgrims jostled to perform the ritual stoning between noon and sunset in Mena, a narrow valley near Mecca…350 died.
Picture riots in Mayo and in Dublin, the latter accompanied by looting and burning. Or gaunt and shocked Iraqis and Lebanese as bombs and bullets, legitimised and unlegitimised, rained on them, killing and flattening in a war that they did not start. Or George Bush mincily marching from his chopper to assure the world that, yes, he has a clue. In his pocket, perhaps.
Picture a woman, snapped on a mobile phone, her face blurred, telling of being trafficked into Ireland as many have been elsewhere. Or this or that woman attacked, beaten, raped. Or Baiba Saulite, gunned down at her home, yet thousands of kilometres from her home. Or four other Latvians, killed in a calamitous crash in Donegal.
Picture a man, ritually strangled more than a thousand years ago, emerging almost whole from a Midlands bog with even his quiff still in place. Or a Russian exile, poisoned, whey-faced and dying in a London hospital. Or a cartoon that could inflame a hundred million.
Picture Michael Stone, back from the peace of forgetting, captured as he launched himself and ‘crude but lethal’ bombs through the doors of Stormont in the same war fury in which he ran at republican mourners in Milltown graveyard all those years ago. Picture Saddam Hussein angrily denouncing his trial as he is condemned to the noose.
It was a year of turmoil, by turns bizarre and shocking – and even as it happened, we wondered: what next? Sure, there was no 9/11 nor a tsunami of note. But there was war and hunger and disease and famine. There was tumult and fury and horror. There was hysteria, here, there, everywhere. Fingers were pointed one way, then another. Many were quick to take offence. Summer’s here and the time is right to go ranting in the streets. And yet, we danced as well. And we worked and drank. We lived as well as died. Tomorrow, perhaps, we’ll have the flood, the fire, the pestilence. But for now, we’ll take Manhattan.

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