You know how these Yuletide reviews go. We talk you through various notable phenomena of the year – natural disasters, sporting triumphs, political mishaps – and, while sighing at the memory, you remark how those adventures of the spring and early summer seem to have happened just yesterday. Can six months really have passed since Germany’s hilarious annihilation of Brazil at the World Cup? So, it seems. Blink and we'll all be watching the same teams dying in the sands of Qatar for the enrichment of FIFA's blazered elite.
Forget all that. The time has come to consider 2014 in pop-cultural balderdash. Oh, it’s been quite a year. By “quite a year” we mean that, while Ukraine fermented and West Africa fell to pestilence, an unprecedented amount of empty gibberish splattered itself about the airwaves.
What did we care about in May? Well, we saw violent unrest in Nigeria and Thailand, but neither of those stories was important enough to trigger a hashtag. There was the more important matter of Solange Knowles’s attack on Jay Z to be considered. Forget Jack the Ripper (subject of a balderdash alert in September, incidentally). The most significant unexplained assault of the last few centuries found Beyoncé's less famous sister launching a series of wild kicks – the sort often seen outside discos in Lahinch at closing time – at her static, oddly unperturbed brother-in-law. Mr Z only moved when a heel threatened to graze the family jewels.
In September, the United States and allies launched a series of air strikes on Syria. Bo-ring! I want to read about the terrible (but ultimately heart-warming) story of Twink’s separation from her miniature Yorkshire Terrier. The well-preserved entertainer triggered much public weeping – and private sniggering – when she announced that poor Teddy Bear had gone missing from a home that, if the footage was any guide, contained more cushions than Arnott's soft furnishings floor. Happily, the dog was eventually found and the nation could sleep easy once more.
There can be little debate about the pop-cultural balderdash phrase of the year. There was no let up in the catalogue of catastrophe during March. Russia annexed Crimea. Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing over the Gulf of Thailand. All very interesting, but have you not heard that Chris Martin, tired of having his intimate chakras manipulated, has fled Gwyneth Paltrow and made a belated lunge for freedom? (The demands of balance require us to stress that she may have run away from him and his dreary decaffeinated mope rock.) When all the year's important stories have been forgotten, the phrase "conscious uncoupling" will still remain etched on our cerebral cortices. That's what happened according to Ms Paltrow. If we had an award we'd put it her way.
Can you believe it was so long ago? Well, yes you almost certainly can. Here's the crux. There is now so much pop-cultural balderdash about the place and it comes at us from so many directions that this sort of non-story can pass through the complete cycle – discovery, viral popularity, overexposure, reinterpretation as satire – in the time it used to take for one journalist to file one diaphanous report. Even the most promiscuous Twitter user will have had the experience of encountering a joke about some supposedly ubiquitous phenomenon before he or she has absorbed the core information. Grumpy Cat has a movie deal? Can I ask who Grumpy Cat is without looking like a moron? Does Grumpy Cat really have a deal or am I being sucked into the satirical aftermath? (You're not. He does.)
Consider something that, though not balderdash, is certainly part of the pop-cultural loop. About two months ago, like many people without sufficient purpose in life, I found myself puzzling over a series of gags about something called "Too Many Cooks". It was clear that this thing — whatever this thing may be – had, to much of the digital world, already taken on the status of yesterday's news. Nobody hip was tweeting about "Too Many Cooks". They were all tweeting about tweets about "Too Many Cooks". It turned out to be a hugely imaginative, darkly hilarious pastiche of the jaunty credits that preceded 1970s sitcoms . An hour after first hearing of "Too Many Cooks" it seemed inconceivable that we had ever lived without the video. It took The Mona Lisa 300 years to become an over-exposed cliché.
As a result of this accelerated cycle, pop-cultural balderdash now feels exhausted long before the time comes round for end-of-year reviews. Can it really be just a few months since “conscious uncoupling” entered the language? Surely, Twink lost her dog in the 16th century. It must be time for the 10th anniversary celebration of Solange’s spirited assault.
This could be classified as a "good thing" if the semi-celebrities boosted by such surges vanished as quickly as the stories that generated them. Astonishingly, this is not the case. In late May, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, following their disgustingly expensive wedding, went to see X-Men: Days of Future Past at the Odeon cinema in Portlaoise. So much balderdash has come down the chute since that event it seems inconceivable that it happened in 2014.
The media follow-spot has swung away. Last month it swung back to bizarre images of Ms Kardashian’s bottom acting as a sort of well-upholstered item of shelving. Now, that’s over. But the new stars of ephemeral balderdash – Ms K, Alexis Chung, Grumpy Cat, Snooki – have proved surprising resistant to obsolescence. Oh, well. Our parents could never explain what Eva or Zsa Zsa Gabor did for a living. Maybe the world has changed less than we think.