Normally I would try to take a balanced reflection on how a year has been, taking in the whole experience. This time the reflection is simple: 2023 was a shit year. I lost my Dad and my dog Jaffa in the last few weeks, and other family members in the weeks around it. The grief is hideously painful.
I can’t say that it is a bad end to an otherwise good year. Aside from the holiday to Corfu, which was pleasant but not our most memorable vacation, the rest of the year was fairly standard. I had earlier trips to Berlin and Ireland, both of which I have visited for years and perhaps found less alluring on these trips. In both cases it felt as if I was revisiting places of old memories rather than forging new ones.
Musically, it’s been a good year. I released An Unreachable Peak, which I am proud of. It met each of the objectives that I set for the project, but it didn’t perform as well as I’d hoped on platforms like Spotify, where my total number of plays this year is lower than 2022, when I didn’t release anything! Obviously an enormous part of this is my reluctance to push the music (I’m more interested spending time learning my instruments than marketing myself), but the same was true last year also, so the fewer plays is disappointing and adds to the shitty nature of 2023. I am most of the way through The Hobbyist, so hopefully that will make a brighter 2024.
Like previous years, I met my ambitions for reading (56 books) and movie watching (157). For context, if you find this counting weird, I started this at the end of 2018 when I felt sick of social media and watching naff television series. I started to read more classic books this year. This is because I found some of the smart thinking stuff a bit lame and obvious in places. My favourite books this year were Hitchcock/Truffaut, parts of The Cult of Creativity, and parts of Brian Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices. Seems a bit pedantic to say ‘parts of’, but in both cases there were parts that I found tedious. An honourable mention for Ulysses, which was very tedious, but I wanted to get through it. In film, my favourites are probably sooo 2022, but I tend to wait around to see whether the hype is actually worth it. In this case I thought Aftersun and Banshees of Inisherrin were great. Both stayed in my thoughts long after seeing them. Third would be The Wicker Man, which I am embarrassed to admit I hadn’t seen before, but really enjoyed. Especially the sequence with Willow’s Song, which I enjoyed a sample on a Sneaker Pimps album years ago. Great film.
So, a terrible year comes to an end. Good riddance. How can I make 2024 better? Well, we’ll see. Last year I rejected resolutions for just ‘taking a few steps towards being the person I’d like to be’. I think the same rings true this year as an ambition. I achieved that goal on some fronts in 2023 but failed on others. It was quite difficult to maintain a rhythm of habits with lots of trips to see my Dad during the year, but obviously I don’t regret any of that.
READ: A Passage To India – E.M.Forster, The Film Sense -Sergei Eisenstein, Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
WATCHED: Limelight, Wizard of AI, Three Faces, The Wicker Man, Last Orders, A Passage to India, Squaring the Circle, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Sing 2, Trevor Noah: Where Was I, Leo, Leave The World Behind, Dawn French is a Huge Twat, Blonde Cobra, Les maîtres fous, Cat People, The Martian
