The pleasure of the dead days

Reflections on the year that was 2023 and my ins and outs for 2024

A former colleague once described the stretch of time between Christmas and New Year as 'the dead days' and I have never been able to think of Betwixtmas as anything else. 

Despite the somewhat macabre name, I don't find the dead days depressing or difficult. I love this stretch where everything is a little strange, almost surreal, most people are still off work but the shops are open. Normal programming has not yet resumed and this liminal state somehow feels like free time. I love free time. 

I have spent my dead days going on long country walks and for pub lunches, eating pick'n'mix sweets in a posh cinema, cleaning my flat, buying a pair of ceramic parrots in a charity shop, fielding one work call and feeling very virtuous for doing so. 

And of course, thinking about the year that has passed. Ah, 2023, you beast. The news was generally dismal with fresh hellish conflicts breaking out across the globe and a horrid, grinding feeling at home. It's strange - I feel I actually did accomplish a lot this year (I bought a flat, survived redundancy, went freelance) and yet I so often felt like an old banger driving down an endless road with parts falling off with each passing mile. When I look back on this year from the vantage point of the dead days, I feel like I just scraped through. Perhaps that's life? Everyone everywhere always feeling like they are just scraping through? If you have felt that way too, well done on scraping through 2023. We made it! 

Yet, I'm also absurdly optimistic for the new year. God, I love a new year - a whole 365 days (366 this leap year!) unfurling before us where anything and everything is possible! I love this point, before it's even started, when it's untouched by reality and magnificent and perfect because life hasn't had the chance to muddy it up yet. 2024, I am full of hope for you. 

Here are my own ins and outs for this glorious brand spanking new year... 

IN

• going for regular phone-free walks

• recognition that Facebook Marketplace is the best thing Zuckerburg has ever built 

• paying for a subscription for a reputable news site

• asking people out in person (please, I cannot go back on Hinge)

• notes app poetry as therapy 

• moving online communities to IRL meetups (I have had a coffee with someone I met on substack (she is so lovely) and there are FB groups to corral meetups for lonely Londoners - 2024 is going to be the year we utilise tech to build in-person communities)

• Kate Moss (she is forever and always in and she's turning 50 this year! )

• communes (living alone is overrated)

• publications paying freelancers promptly 

• Keir Starmer

• living by Dolly Parton's words - 'Don't get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life’ which I think translates to: spend time with the people you love and laugh every time you get the chance.

OUT 

• sleeping with my phone in the same room 

• Temu and any other online shop selling goods for way too cheap (no, it may be a costa del living crisis but no)

• getting all your news from a free, loud and angry website 

• dating apps 

• scrolling instead of reading 

• judging other people's relationships (they're all weird, wacky and magical, I gotta silence the judgey voice in my head)

• nepo babies (we need a revolution)

• psychedelics (I'm tempted to take them and have the much talked-about breakthrough so people need to stop going on about them for the sake of my sobriety)

• underpaying (sweetpea, we are in a costa del living crisis, haven't you heard?)

• continually looking on RightMove when you're not planning on buying or renting somewhere (it's not a fun, quirky habit, it's an unhealthy compulsion)

• Rishi Sunak (nothing personal, but it’s over)

• capitalism

Ooh, that was fun! And finally here are some pieces I wrote this year that I'm proud of. This means the world to me because at this time of year, every year, I have watched as all the journalists put out their threads of the 'interesting things I worked on this year' and I've never done one. Until this year, I never really had the opportunity to write something for the national press that I was actually proud of. But, well, this tough, gnarly old year, I actually did write a few pieces I was proud of and that's all down to being freelance. So here they are…  

Don't congratulate me for buying a flat. My parents gave me the money 

This was about how we need to be honest about how we're buying our first flats in London (the bank of mum and dad, duh) and how the property market is unhinged and unfair so only those with rich parents can afford a home in the capital and that's not right. I was a bit anxious writing it and wading into what is, understandably, such a fraught topic but the response was great and I felt like it was something that needed to be said.

Antidepressants saved me - but they killed my libido 

Oh, this was my first freelance piece and also, The Times arranged for a shoot with a stylist and hairdresser and makeup artist and I just loved the picture the photographer took of me. But mainly, I'm glad I wrote about something that all of my friends and I talked about - how Sertraline wiped your sex drive - and yet never really read anything about in the mainstream media. 

The men and women so desperate to be parents, they have a baby with a stranger — then raise it as if they're divorced

Oooh, I loved this because it was a proper interview about such a fascinating concept - having a child with someone you've never been in a relationship with, or even had sex with, and raising the child as though you are divorced parents. I think it's so interesting and, to my mind, it sounds like such a nicer way of having a baby than with a sperm donor. 

Teach children about pensions – not just how to put condoms on bananas

I really don't like this headline and I wish I had put my foot down about it because I feel it cheapened what was actually quite a serious piece about the lack of financial education on offer in Britain's schools and how so many of us are leaving without even a rudimentary understanding of credit cards and investing and budgeting. And that's wrong! 

I thought vaping was my pleasure but a book showed me it was a tyranny. With one leap, I was free

I never thought I'd see my words in The Guardian and it was a thrill to be in a 'proper' publication like that. And  I'm thankful everyday that I'm no longer sucking away on my Peach Ice Elf Bar. If your new year's resolution is to stop smoking or vaping, you can do it! If I, sometimes known to puff my way through 40 cigarettes in one day, can live life without regular doses of nicotine, you can too! 

The seedy retreat where a 'shaman' charges £800 to get high on hallucinogenic drug ayahuasca

The first, and so far the only, time I went undercover - with a camera concealed in my backpack like something out of James Bond. I spent six hours lying on a mattress in an outhouse while people around me vomited and tripped and a shaman banged a bongo and his yoga teacher girlfriend wailed.

And finally, thank you, for subscribing to this Substack and making it such a pleasant place to hang out this year. I'm looking forward to writing to you more in 2024. I'll see you on the other side xxx