No swim for Yule, for the first time in years, and no swim on Christmas morning or the days either side — I’ve got the virus that seems to be flattening people’s festivities, and I go to bed on the 20th shivering and aching, and barely get up until Christmas Eve. In some ways it’s sad — my body feels so pathetically mortal and I am never a patient patient, I want to feel better now — but in others it’s wonderful: the housemates bring me Lemsip and cut-up-apple, and all I can do is cough out a few vague directions and release all other plans from my grasp. We make Christmas dinner together, although mostly it involves me lying on a fainting couch and making weak suggestions, and I occasionally put on outdoor shoes to shuffle around the streets, including an early morning walk on the 25th where other early backlit silhouettes wish us a Merry Christmas, until I’m too feeble to continue, and we limp home. A few days later and I walk further, and see the path that’s been completed along the river bank. Workers have been there for a month or two now, and what was a central bank between lake and river, dusty in the summer, full of wasps and kingfishers, and muddy in the winter, ice-pocketed and guarded by hissing swans, has been concreted over in a wide, flat path. I hate it. I hate it. There are parallel paths either side of the lake and river that allow access and smooth walks to those who need it — this was another brief moment of nature that someone decided was too natural and needed destroying. Combined with the news that Universal have bought up nearly 500 acres of land nearby, full of river, fields, hedgerows and trees, with the intent of turning it into a UK park and resort, I want to give up. I hate it. I don’t think ‘a significant positive economic impact’ undoes the destruction of our planet. I don’t think there’s any possible way that an enormous multinational theme park with hundreds of thousands of visitors a year could cause anything other that massive environmental damage.
I think: 2024 will be the year I give up hope. It is so hard, it is so endless, it is so pointless and thankless and exhausting, and it feels clear that maybe it’s just more sensible to give up on hope. Friends and family have died this year; others have moved away, or plan to next year; there is depletion, there is disappointment, there is parting after parting after parting. Love sometimes just feels like a preparation for more loss. Culture is dumb, and getting dumber; intellectualism is a piñata to be beaten by the Extremely Online until the correct phrases fall out and the intellectual stops existing in any meaningful way; no one meaningful seems to care about the climate catastrophe; democracy is collapsing; more war, more division, more fear.
But the frustrating truth of course is that hopelessness is even harder than hope. Existing in hope may be exhausting. It is bloody, it is muscular and effortful, it requires seeing the best of people even when they don’t display it, it means loving people when they don’t want our love and believing with gritted teeth in the joys we can share, in clever thinking, in engaged discussion, in growth and development, in change and forgiveness. Hope is this dumb semi-accidental tumblr poem that captures the sheer stubbornness you have to develop to keep hope alive. I’ve done hopelessness and it’s awful, crushing and enfeebling and dull beyond words. It’s not smart to be hopeless: it’s boring, and I don't want it. Death is inevitable, but there's still time. Anyway! Here are my highlights from 2023.
SKETCHES:
Much as I don’t want to exist in a youtube bubble — listen to albums, not singles! — sometimes a single sketch says everything you need to. Mostly old, but all brilliant, this year we've enjoyed multiple rewatches of Key & Peele’s Text Confusion sketch, Armstrong & Miller’s physics expert, Mitchell & Webb’s ever-apt Baddies, and not a sketch, but Dave’s explanation of the financial crash in Happy Endings has made ‘let me back up’ an ever-present phrase in most household anecdotes. From what Dan McCoy calls ‘the worst show I’ve watched every episode of’, we regularly review Papyrus, Amazon Echo Silver, Dear Sister, Christmas Morning, Amazon Go, Enhancement Drug, and Traffic Altercation; almost any Weekend Update segment with Michael Longfellow, Andrew Dismukes or Marcello Hernández, or any sketch with Bowen Yang; most Please Don’t Destroy sketches, not least Three Sad Virgins, Ramen Order, Wellness, and Self Defense. Going mostly cold-turkey on Inside and Bo Burnham generally means that while I have regained some sanity, it gives the housemates fewer opportunities to sing The Chicken, which is a stone-cold ballad banger.
TV:
TV-wise, we’ve been spoiled by the final series of Succession, a masterpiece examination of corruption, the American Dream, and family trauma. Loved it. In the most opposite possible way, I rewatched Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen, also a masterpiece examination of corruption, the American Dream, and family trauma, but with extra mini-squid, cloned servants, masked police, and President Robert Redford. Although it’s four years old now, I’m sure there are still people who haven’t seen it — please do, really. There are no weak links in the entire thing, it’s imaginative and sharp as a razor, taking the original comic and lifting it to a searing present-day examination of white supremacy and racial exploitation, power and technology.
I also rewatched both Community and Happy Endings, this time with the housemates, and I’m so glad that they now say baggle, rooof stoooof, and Max’s ‘Here we go!’. I’m also into my fourth rewatch of Mythic Quest, the Pandemic episode of which might go into my memorial time capsule for the way it captured both the best and worst moments of Covid lockdown. For new television, I loved Extraordinary, a British and female-led look at the superhero genre; The Greatest Show Never Made, a moving, hilarious, and enraging documentary about very early reality TV and the bonds we can make when we come together; Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, an Agatha Christie adaptation that appreciates we don’t necessarily want our escapist Golden Age plots filmed like Fincher’s Zodiac, and Gregg Wallace: The British Miracle Meat, a Swiftian satire that we collectively watched four times in twelve hours. That’s gravy, baby.
In films, I’ve had a mostly duff year at the cinema bar three highlights: Past Lives, with the luminously beautiful Greta Lee and Teo Yoo, John Wick 4, an extreme action flick I absolutely should not even have liked but which gave me a bubble of joy in my chest that still hasn’t subsided, nine months on, and best of all, Bottoms, a film which should be available on prescription. You know when you love someone, then share some art with them and they love it just as much as you do? It might be the best feeling in the world, and certainly made me ask how different my life might have been had I been taken to see a lesbian high school fight club comedy by authority figures when I was a teen. It’s so weird, and uncomfortable, and over the top, and the time period isn’t clear, and the humour is grotesque. It’s also the most female-gaze-y film I think I’ve ever seen, and takes the idea of ‘female existence as a horror film’ — my constant theory — and shows how we can make all the real horrors of a girl’s existence — abuse, stalking, exploitation, the threat of male violence, a porn-drenched culture, the patriarchy — and turn it into a joyful, vivid, sexy, howl-from-the-sunroof-of-a-speeding-car celebration of girls and women in union. Fuck, it’s so great.
At home, we’ve had a glut of horror joys thanks to my pal Tom Humberstone’s Grave Offerings, a daily newsletter sent throughout October that has got one housemate fully into the delights of a good horror film. Besides The Innocents, Alien, A Quiet Place, and the staggeringly underrated Pontypool, we also took in Duel, which I hadn’t seen since watching it with my father when I was a youngish child. Like almost everything you leave untouched for thirty years, it was completely different to how I remembered it, and I watched it now as a brilliant essay on the traumas of David Mann’s time in Vietnam. Tom’s essay on Duel in particular is fantastic, and will change forever how you see a ‘shark film’.
More fuel to my ‘female existence as a horror film’ theory were Happening, Petite Maman, Mustang, and Spencer. I was put off Spencer for a long time since I’ve never had any interest in Diana or her marriage, but this film was more like The Others than The Crown, and has a haunting lushness that stayed with me. Mustang continues to be among my favourite films of the twenty-first century, and I genuinely believe it should be compulsory viewing in schools. The counters to my theory seem to be films with a tipping-point of women; Little Women, Steel Magnolias, Fried Green Tomatoes. We watched the latter at the start of the year, and for all its flaws I’m still struggling to stop saying, ‘You ain’t nothing but a bee charmer, Idgie Threadgoode.’
In books, January saw me reading the second of Tim Key’s lockdown books, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush. The first was hilarious and crushing, reminding me of the weirdness and loneliness of the first lockdown; this second work made me cry again, for the desperate hopefulness of beginning to reconnect with loved ones, with strangers, with life. Do you remember how special we found going to a coffee shop again?
I’d forgotten how foolproof Nick Hornby’s recommendations in the Believer are, and so finally got round to reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow when I saw he'd praised it, having pooh-poohed it myself due to its massive success. I read it in less than twenty-four hours and didn’t stop sobbing for at least that long, pressing it into several people’s hands until they agreed to read it too, if I’d stop hiccupping at them. If I’ve read it, I’m certain you have by now.
I managed only a few children’s books this year — my favourite by far was When You Reach Me, pressed into my hands by a housemate with the same fever I’d passed on Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. I don’t know how famous it is, but without spoiling anything it’s a wonderful primer for budding fans of early-Christopher Nolan (of which I’m sure there are tonnes).
I’d read a phonebook if David Sedaris wrote it, so I was delighted to have his first volume of diaries to go back to in the winter months; at the other end of the year I read another sharp-eyed look at human connection, in the form of A Glass of Blessings. What would I do without Pym and Sedaris, I wonder? Finally, I got Elton John’s memoir, Me, for Christmas and finished it pronto. He’s rather wonderfully both a total nightmare and the most generous, self-aware, loving, creative, and amusing character I’ve enjoyed for a long time. Like all good music books, I want to go back and hear his entire back catalogue from the very beginning.
When it comes to food and drink, I’m discovering the delights of non-alcoholic gin and negronis. I haven’t really drunk alcohol for years, but I do miss that grown-up taste of something sour and special. I recently rediscovered how easy moules marinière are, and if I can afford the shelled delights through the winter I may make it again for Imbolc.
All of us will die, but we can do plenty of good things in the meantime. I wish you a 2024 full of good health, good fortune, and wonderful coming togethers.