We Made It Through Another Year

Hello Dear Reader

Now, I could start this newsletter with something along the lines of ‘it’s been a year’ as has become common parlance in end of year round-ups these days. But at the risk of stating the obvious: every year has been a year. Some of you have had - hopefully - a marvellous 2023. Some of you will cheer with relief that it is over on December 31st.

And some of you will observe that 365 days came and went without much ceremony.

Any year that ends with me being able to write a newsletter and you being able to read it cannot be all bad: we are still here my friend. A chimney did not fall on our heads, in the immortal words of The Tamperer (feat.Maya), and the public at large have stopped stockpiling toilet roll.

And besides, fanfare is so boring; so very predictable. One gets to a certain age and could write the copy of every year in review piece in every decent publication with our eyes closed. When not busy retrospecting, by the middle of December we can even make confident predictions about which bands and books the cultural gatekeepers will insist we must like and those that will be number one a year hence. One of my favourite things to do at this time of year is predict which of these much hyped things will sink without a trace by May. Mean spirited, I know, but no sensible person wants to be told what they ought to be into - please, allow us the illusion of being able to think for ourselves even if we do eventually succumb to wearing Crocs, because, y’know, they're really quite comfy.

I’m actually in a fantastic mood as I write, and I feel it is my civic duty to tell you why I think this is, and even if it’s dangerous, to give you some advice. A few years ago, at approximately 7.35pm on Christmas Eve 2020 to be precise, I had an epiphany in the middle of my fifth disastrous attempt to make mayonnaise. 2020 broke many of us, it is true, and how arrogant of me to get to the end of that year thinking I might be the exception. Ultimately I was broken by mustard, or rather the lack of it. Only when I chucked the last of the broken eggs in the bin did I realise I had repeatedly forgotten a crucial ingredient that was sitting there unopened and staring at me accusingly.

Dear Reader, I wept. In the almost words of the goddess Alanis, it’s like one whole jar of Colman’s Mustard when all you need is an egg. I was delirious with grief. Unhinged. I’d been up since 4am so I could be first in the queue to pick up our turkey at the local supermarket, and as I clung to my kitchen island rocking back and forth in my festive deers apron, the small still voice of sanity that mercifully still resided in my brain suggested that I might be putting a bit too much pressure on myself and Christmas itself to make everything perfect. It was just a day, among all the others. Just a day. I could get it right the following year by removing mayonnaise from the menu.

But for me, Christmas is not just a day. It is my true north. I enjoy my birthday, yes, but mostly it is Christmas I live for. The days in between - my actual life - are for the most part just filler. I believe in magic all year round, and when for one day of the year millions of people around the globe suspend their disbelief and celebrate the birth of a kid born in a barn to a woman who said she hadn’t shagged anybody ever at all honest guv!, I feel less alone. Up and down the land, young minds not yet addled by the lies of reality genuinely imagine that an eighteen stone septuagenarian might be defying the laws of physics and gravity and hurtling through the atmosphere with the latest PS5 for Archie at Number 19, Walnut Drive, Basildon, Essex, England.

Magic makes everything better.

Magic needs ritual, but it is bigger than ritual. It exists all the time, for everyone, but we have conned ourselves into thinking it involves machines like the Large Hadron Collider or wearing weird clothes and smelling of patchouli. How silly all that is, when mulled wine is a perfectly acceptable gateway drug and if you required any further evidence of why Christmas is the magic we need, three people opened doors for me today and a stranger wished me Happy Christmas in the gym even though I was very sweaty and possibly smelt bad. That didn’t happen to anybody in Rosemary’s Baby, did it.

Now, you might be thinking I love Christmas because nothing bad ever happened to me during the festive period. Au contraire. There are few lower points in life than eating a happy meal in a McDonald’s in Wolverhampton on Christmas Day the same year the best gift you got was a hairbrush. Or spending your formative years wrapping presents for siblings who don’t know you exist and wondering if you’ll ever get to meet them one day, never mind sit down to a festive lunch with them.

It is precisely because I am intimately acquainted with the bleakness of the holidays that I throw everything at it each year.

It is ridiculous. I am ridiculous. We are all ridiculous.

To be human is to be ridiculous.

And this is a good thing.

But because you are ridiculous, in all likelihood you will sit down to make New Year’s Resolutions in coming days. You and I both know that this is a folly, but a folly you repeat on an annual basis all the same. Still, let me ask you this: when you give yourself a pep talk on January 1st and chide yourself to do better, do you thank yourself for getting you this far?

Like, well done me, I’m not dead, I’m here muddling through, being ridiculous and fabulous in my own inimitable fashion.

You should. Unless you’re Michelle Mone or George Santos, WELL DONE YOU! GO STRAIGHT TO GO AND COLLECT YOUR £200!

We live in a society which celebrates extremes, good or bad; a world thirsty for notoriety as much as it is for excellence. But most of the world - the world that ticks along and gets things done, that takes the bins out, puts plasters on cut knees and plods along formatting excel spreadsheets and jet washing the car at the weekend - most of the world that really counts is criminally overlooked. We don’t give out prizes for just getting life done without making a fuss. We have a tendency to make heroes out of people who rose to occasions at the perfect intersection of luck and synchronicity. A hair’s breadth either way and it might have been disaster. And heroism is nigh on impossible to sustain over the long term.

True heroism is unremarkable. It is to keep living a small and quiet life that rises each morning and manages to find energy and enthusiasm even when confronted with less than ideal situations. A job that pays the bills but robs the soul. Raising families, wiping arses, wiping the arses of people who wiped your arse in turn. Trying to remember whether it’s too soon to feed everyone lasagna for supper again. Bills. Hoping every day that your cat loves you as much as you love it. Accepting every day that this is impossible. More bills. More lasagna and you don’t even like it that much. Trying to find a time hole on the treadmill of existence where you might plot a moment of transcendence. More bills. More indifferent cats. The broken lightbulb you’ve been meaning to replace since you moved in two years ago.

If this is you, congratulations! You are a gold medallist in the Getting By Olympics. Given that being good at javelin is only really useful if you’re in the Battle of Hastings, I’d be so bold as to say this is the only Olympics that really counts.

As you go about your business this end of year, I don’t want merely to wish you a Merry Christmas. That goes without saying. I just want you to know that even if you’re not a fan of the festive season, even if you haven’t had the greatest of years, even if you’re filled with trepidation for what comes next - and even if none of those things - there is always someone who sees even your littlest wins and is cheering you on. We are a world made up of each other - there is nothing without each and every one of us. Isn’t that mad? Isn’t that miraculous?

Isn’t that magic?

Merry Christmas my loves. Thank you for reading, but most of all thank you for being here.

With love as ever,

Nerina xxx