Everyone gets a recap of their year, except the two of you

Everyone’s recap but yours

Early December, phones start telling their owners’ stories. The song played on a loop, the kilometres run, the city where you slept most. Everybody shows theirs round the table, teases the other person’s, compares. For ten minutes, everyone is rather proud of their year.

Then the phone goes back on the table, and it dawns on you that the year that really counted has no summary. The one you spent together: the flat viewed in the rain, the weekend the car gave up, the dog who turned up before you’d finished making up your minds. It exists in no particular order, scattered over three photo albums, two message threads and the memory of one of you.

A year for two fits into five moments

The trap with a review is trying to fit everything in. A year has three hundred and sixty-odd days and you’ll never tell more than five of them: the one where something changed, the trip that started badly and ended well, the evening you still go on about. Sort it out together, scrolling through the photos month by month: one memory per season, plus one for the thing nobody photographed.

Then come the numbers, and this is where it gets fun. Not the serious ones, your own: cups of coffee shared, series finished, kilometres of pushing the pram, the times one of you said “five minutes” and it was forty. You keep four, each with what it counts. And you finish with a word for the year: Finally, Together, Breathe, Home.

The poster that puts it all in order: “Le Bilan”

That is exactly what the “Le Bilan” poster holds: your names and the year in large letters, the five moments with their place, your four numbers, the word of the year and a line at the bottom. Only the names, the year and the first moment are required; the rest is added line by line, and a line left empty doesn’t print.

Below your numbers, three more are calculated for the year, and these are no joke: the number of days, of weekends and of full moons. A year has twelve or thirteen of those, counted one by one for yours. Type another year and those three numbers change with it.

Four styles for four characters. Neon, violet night and coral, for the couple who show everything. Journal, cream with double rules, for the one who keeps everything. Retro, mustard yellow like a gig poster. Minimal, white with a single red dot, for anyone allergic to the unnecessary. The preview follows every keystroke, and it is exactly what gets printed.

When the story is longer than a year

Sometimes the story worth telling isn’t the last twelve months but the whole thing: the meeting, the first flat, the yes. For that, another poster tells three to eight moments, each with a title and, if you want, a date, a place and a little drawing. The date is free text: “the summer we met” will do, nobody asks for the exact day.

And for the couple on the move, there is the world map in dots: every trip is joined to home by an arc, with its numbered badge and four calculated numbers: trips, countries, continents, kilometres. You can put in from two to twelve trips, and each place is searched freely.

Who to give it to, and when

The review works in several directions. To your other half, of course, for Christmas or Valentine’s Day. But also to a couple of friends whose year you watched go by, to a best friend (“Ines & Sami”, “The Martins”: the names are free text) or to a whole family, with the four of them at home and the fits of laughter every day.

The best moment is December, while the year is still warm and nobody has had time to forget it. Printing takes the workshop two days at most, then it is the carrier’s turn: leave a week for France, ten days elsewhere. A review given after the new year has its charm too, with a whole year of hindsight.