Ho ho ho! Merry new year, one and aaaaalllll!!! I’ve been ILL all holidays which, on the face of it sounds very bad, however it has somehow managed to be one of the all-time best Christmases anyway. Perhaps it was that my (fairly minor) spate of illness was just in that sweet-spot where it was bad enough that I could legitimately pull out of social events of all sorts, but good enough that I could still lock the doors and enjoy the quiet and stillness of the season without hacking my guts up! Perfect.
Cooked a lot. Laughed a lot. Bubbled with my also-relatively-poorly immediate loved ones a lot. Honestly, it was actually great.
“Oh we should visit … ah, no we can’t.”
“Mulled wine?”
“Mulled wine.”
What a holiday it was. Never been so lazy, nor enjoyed myself quite so much. Perhaps this is how we humans should be, eh? People who stop producing anything for the chilly season and instead opt to close their eyes in sync with the setting of the sun. People who put on animal furs and dig into the back of the cave with some fermented treats, who won’t move unless it’s to fart and giggle in equal measure.
Bliss.
How’ve you all been, eh? Enjoying the consequences of voting for a murderous despot? Splendid, splendid.
Silly times.
Honestly, I feel strangely positive about how everything’s going around the world, at the moment. Sure, we’re on the brink of plopping the majority of the world into the tiny little hands of four or five of the shittest examples of masculinity the planet has ever seen, but you know a big part of me feels this is more than survivable.
It’s certainly not the first time some total cocks have been given more power than the can of tinned spam that would normally denote their limit of leadership. And though it won’t be the last, I do feel like we’re slowly, slowly, slowly progressing towards utopia (certainly if you take the broad view of the last few centuries).
Yes, I do realise that we could be reasonably described as being up to our armpits in dystopia already, having overtaken 90% of the wildest nightmares of the 1950s-1970s scifi writers.
BUT … but. The bad stuff makes the headlines. Particularly when so many headlines are owned by so many with so much money, hell-bent on dividing in order to keep their little conquering business going. As if we’re all still in 16th century Florence. And with media so skewed towards division and misery, it’s easy to miss the broader patterns; the good works that are going on. The breakthroughs. The potentials. The legends, walking among us in plain view.
It’s easy to forget our humanity, lose sight of our brilliance. But it’s there, twinkling away, strong as always.
And as we lean into a new year full of its robust fears and its mustard-seed hopes, I wish us all clarity. Messages of love are those things which will always bring us into clarity, that’s how we can spot them (and their antitheses). Clear words bring us all out from the cloudwork of the shits and into the richly-oxygenated atmosphere of the real, where we can rub our eyes and look afresh once more.
So let our 2026 be decorated with clarity, as we stumble, headlong into love for one another, our dystopian-themed onesies torn from us to reveal the utopia we always were, bright and shining.
Also, boobies.
I had the flu all Xmas, no problem, powered through it with a bit a rum here and there!! Happy new year to you! Looking forward to what comes.
Happy New Year. Hope you’re feeling better now.
And a “Gelukkig nieuwjaar!” to you and your alter ego as well. Perhaps your malady was spread to the both of you and that’s why it wasn’t too debilitating.