There are certain signals Australians are acutely aware of. Discovering dozens of kangaroos in the garden at the crack of dawn is one of them. Television news reporter Mr Hamish Macdonald and his partner, Mr Jacob Fitzroy, were in the small town of Tathra on the south coast of New South Wales, enjoying a well-deserved Christmas holiday among friends. On what was meant to be the last sunrise of 2019, the sun didn’t rise. Instead, Mr Macdonald was woken early by numerous messages, missed calls and notifications from family and friends. Something was wrong. “It was clear from the colour of the sky, the smell of smoke and the dust in the air that things were changing pretty rapidly,” remembers the 39-year-old. “The kangaroos on the front lawn had obviously fled the bushfires.”

Sod the chablis. Boo to Bollinger. We’re thinking outside the box this year with our celebratory drinking, so we asked expert Mr Brodie Meah, co-owner of Top Cuvée, our current favourite London wine den, to take us on a trip around Europe and suggest a few bottles that are as interesting as they are inexpensive. He’s offered up his preferred food pairings, but you are very welcome to switch in your own accompaniment – which could, of course, be another bottle. After the year we’ve all had, feel free to enjoy irresponsibly.

Unlike millions of others around the world, I came to Schitt’s Creek late. Until the second half of this year, I was blissfully unaware of the show or that it had started out on Canadian television before being picked up in the US and then building its audience on Netflix. I was oblivious to the fact it had been running for six years and 80 episodes before it swept the board in all seven comedy categories at the Emmys in September.

First let me say, I am a dog person. I love dogs. I just didn’t want to own one. To me there were so many reasons not to take on dog ownership, especially during a pandemic. These past nine months have been (and still are) really hard. Our lives went from being normal, to resembling a low-budget indie film about the Apocalypse that only had the ability to shoot at one location and the runtime was half a year. Plus, why would I add more stress to a time when we are all already carrying a tremendous amount of anxiety and depression? Which probably accounts for why I cried at the end of Hubie Halloween “Goddammit Mayor Hubie, you finally got the respect you deserved.” So, in this state, the last thing I wanted to do was be down on my hands and knees trying to scrub an “accident” out of a rug while a dog barked at me.

There are certain signals Australians are acutely aware of. Discovering dozens of kangaroos in the garden at the crack of dawn is one of them. Television news reporter Mr Hamish Macdonald and his partner, Mr Jacob Fitzroy, were in the small town of Tathra on the south coast of New South Wales, enjoying a well-deserved Christmas holiday among friends. On what was meant to be the last sunrise of 2019, the sun didn’t rise. Instead, Mr Macdonald was woken early by numerous messages, missed calls and notifications from family and friends. Something was wrong. “It was clear from the colour of the sky, the smell of smoke and the dust in the air that things were changing pretty rapidly,” remembers the 39-year-old. “The kangaroos on the front lawn had obviously fled the bushfires.”

Sod the chablis. Boo to Bollinger. We’re thinking outside the box this year with our celebratory drinking, so we asked expert Mr Brodie Meah, co-owner of Top Cuvée, our current favourite London wine den, to take us on a trip around Europe and suggest a few bottles that are as interesting as they are inexpensive. He’s offered up his preferred food pairings, but you are very welcome to switch in your own accompaniment – which could, of course, be another bottle. After the year we’ve all had, feel free to enjoy irresponsibly.