This time of year, work becomes a tension between two opposing forces: the inevitable winding down of the year, as fewer projects appear and people begin to drift away, and the equally inevitable rush to get whatever remains to be done.
It’s a tension that keeps me awake at night — literally, as I wake up at 4- or 5am thinking about some half-remembered work, something forgotten which won’t quite get done in time for the end of the year.
I like things to be running smoothly. In fact, without it, I always take on too much, trying to fix all the things at the same time. It is, to put it mildly, less than ideal.
This year as every year I have a lot of leave to take. In fact, my last day in the (virtual) office is this coming Friday, and I won’t be back till the 6th of January. It’s not the longest break I have ever taken — I’m sure there was one December where I ended up taking the whole month off — but it’s still a long break of three weeks. Plenty of time to get some thinking and some writing done.
There are a lot of ways that 2024 has been a pretty bad year for me. No doubt I will write about some of them in the future, but it’s been a major year of change, and I don’t think I have coped with it particularly well. One of the ways its been quite difficult is writing. Although I have succeeded in getting some non-fiction work done, my fiction has slowed to a crawl, in line with the amount of and stress of my day job.
It hasn’t been the healthiest year either. I think I have observed before that if you’re a man over the age of 55 you start to get the NHS Rolls Royce treatment when it comes to tests. My routine blood test found my platelet level elevated, which is most likely a sign of your body fighting something off, and so in the past couple of eeks I have had more blood tests, poo tests, and a chest X-ray.
The chest x-ray is a great example of the NHS getting things right, at least where I live. I got a referral letter from my GP. All I had to do was turn up at the local hospital, at any time. And when I showed up, I was seen within five minutes, and out within ten. I’m sure my American friends will be astounded by this — and the fact, of course, that it cost me nothing.
This weekend I had planned to head into London to go to the Tate’s exhibition on the 80s, plus the one at Tate Modern on pre-modern computer art. However, the storm has put paid to that, with trains cancelled and advisories of not to travel. It’s not been the same level of awfulness which we have seen in the west — but living on top of a hill, with plenty of trees around, even lower levels of wind can prove chaotic.
Last weekend I was down in Bristol for a friend’s 50th birthday. It’s a city that I love. Talking to strangers in arty places and them actually asking what my name is is a different experience from the southeast, one which reminds me of the good parts of living back up in the north. I’m a city kid at heart and always will be. Canterbury, while technically a city, isn’t that exciting. Owned by a combination of the church and the King’s School, there is remarkably little room for culture here. That might be surprising given there are two large universities, but unis tend to keep themselves to themselves, and don’t really seem to have much impact on the city other than to deliver a chronic shortage of housing.
Chronic enough, in fact, for a small collection of tents to have formed a permanent encampment on a roadside verge in the city. And thanks to funding cuts to Kent County Council from the former government, one of the best local charities helping the homeless has lost #1m of funding. It’s not the council’s fault, but it’s something the new government needs to fix, pretty quickly. Local provision of everything from adult education to places for homeless people to help for kids who have special educational needs is collapsing. Of course, so is much of the rest of the country, from roads and rail to higher education. Fixing 14 years of horrific austerity is going to take more than one term, and it’s going to take a lot of bravery.
No wonder I feel like I have been radicalised by the last 14 years. I’ve moved from middle of the road Labour to “time to tear down capitalism” in one pretty short leap. Well, it is about time, and in a sense, I’m just moving back to my position when I was a lot younger. I made hay during the 90s and early 2000’s. Now, I’m aghast that young people aren’t getting to do the same.