Like me, you may have been wondering why you’ve been feeling exhausted this Easter weekend. If so, this section of Friday’s Politico London Playbook may hold an explanation:

Easter is a time for reflection — the perfect time, then, to cast one’s mind back to Boris Johnson’s Easter Sunday message last year. Johnson said the U.K. “bursts with new life and new hope” and “beyond the suffering lies redemption.” The jury might be out on the redemption front, but there’s sure been plenty of suffering for the Conservatives — Playbook’s ace reporter Noah Keate has rounded up a few of the year’s highlights.

Since last Easter: More than 100 Downing Street fixed penalty notices … 485 lost Tory seats at the local elections … Second place for the U.K. to Ukraine in Eurovision … One Sue Gray report … One MP resigning for watching porn in the Commons … One platinum jubilee … One (survived) vote of confidence in Johnson … Two Tory by-election defeats … 62 resignations in early July 2022 … Two Tory leadership contests … Two new PMs … Two new home secretaries … Three new chancellors … Four new education secretaries … 15 housing ministers since 2010 … One new monarch … Around 250,000 members of “The Queue” … One mini-budget … Over 1,000 mortgage products withdrawn from the market … Eightunforgettable BBC local radio interviews … Gavin Williamson’s third departure from government … Another NHS winter crisis … One Windsor Framework … One new Met Police commissioner … 

And breathe: … Twitter almost collapsing several times … 40C temperatures in July … OneCommonwealth Games … One “Wagatha Christie” trial … Countless Matt Hancock moments on “I’m a Celeb” … Over 100,000 leaked WhatsApp messages … Six episodes of “Harry & Meghan” on Netflix … OnePrince Harry tome … One U-turn on privatizing Channel 4 … Over 1 million job vacancies … Eight Bank of England interest rate rises … The highest inflation for decades … Skyrocketing energy bills … No new nuclear power stations opened … One coal mine approved … HS2 delayed … One new Scottish first minister … One new Australian prime minister … One new New Zealand prime minister … One U.S. presidential indictment … No return to Northern Ireland power-sharing … and zero migrants sent to Rwanda. So far.

Hardly any of this has a direct impact on me personally, but I think there’s a palpable drag on the public mood when the new cycle is so packed with such misery, dishonesty, incompetence, and fear. Unfortunately, it doesn’t feel like much of it is going to get better any time soon.

But despondency doesn’t really help. Perhaps we ought to use spring to count our blessings and to seek the joy in everyday life, and to try to focus on that for a while. Or, as it’s Easter Sunday, maybe I’ll just stuff my face with chocolate for a while.