New Year Sets Sail

On Boxing Day, the boats set sail for the Sydney To Hobart Yacht race; they swoop out of the mouth of the harbour under whatever sail-type is most fashionable/technically proven this year.

If I’m in Sydney, I try to watch the beginning of the race - a family tradition to sit with a bowl of cherries and see them fly across the dark-sparkling wrinkles of the harbour water - though once the boats are out of sight around South Head, I realise I’ve never followed the race past that point. I don’t even know which boats are which. I’m just there for the thrill of the billowing sails and the speed of their beginning, and the bowl of cherries.

If only by virtue of lots of people getting their holidays right now, this is the time of year for reflecting on the last year and projecting hopes and plans for the next year.

If reflecting and hopes and plans are your jam. For some people it isn’t, or they don’t like doing the thing other people are doing at the same time as other people are doing it. Which is fair enough; I’ve been in that place before. This year though, because everything feels a bit chaotic and inchoate, the idea of imposing some order on the tumbling rush of time and events is appealing to me. It’s a nice idea and can be a nourishing process even if all plans inevitably go awry when they meet the enemy that is reality, and the fiction that we can control and herd our past and future selves through a process of lists and bullet points is a little bit silly. I guess I’ve always been a fan of silly.

If you don’t do new years looking-back/looking-forward games, when do you fit in your spring cleaning of self concept? Or is that whole process a thing you prefer to avoid? Or a thing you drip-feed through the year?

Concrete Reality

For many of my creative friends, these kinds of New Year Posts are a moment to actually think about what you’ve achieved over the year and corral all of the disparate bits into a boast-post on social media. Which is important! It can feel like a lot of the work we do is ephemeral, not-cumulative.

I remember catching a lift once in the highlands of Scotland with a man who had been a road-layer. And he’d pointed out some stretches of road he’d built in his day. I’d just finished the month of performing in Edinburgh for that year, and felt a pang of envy for being able to look back at the work you’d done by meter and mile and see it set there in concrete (asphalt). Undeniable in distance and utility.

Performance art particularly can feel like it evaporates into air the moment it has been completed. Which of course is part of its value, in a world where the promise of artificial everything is shoved in our faces every day, being in a room with people and experiencing something that will not ever be done in the same way again is a luxury. That said, it’s nice to have a record of what’s been done.

What I’ve been up to

Apart from a year’s worth of regular Gargle episodes, the irregular launch of Tea With Alice Season 2 and a bunch of guest-hosting on The Bugle, I was a guest on a few podcasts that I love, including Past Times, Pod Yourself The Wire and Dear Nelly. I’d like to guest on more podcasts and shows this year.

If you want my last two solo shows, they’re here: https://www.gofasterstripe.com/cgi-bin/w.cgi?showfull=54450 as a £10 bundle. If you want to watch in publication order, I recommend watching CHRONOS first and then Twist. I don’t know what it does to the narrative to watch them in the other direction.

Heaping Helping

On the broader scale I’ve been thinking about how (to my mind) the most satisfying thing in the world is the feeling that we are making other people’s lives better; whether that’s through family-caring, community participation, useful work or creating good things. I’d like to keep doing as much of all of those things as possible this year.

It can feel sometimes like parenthood is a shortcut to that kind of satisfaction (you’re keeping someone alive! You’re growing and nurturing their personhood! You can see the road you’re building mile by mile!). Maybe that’s why people paint parenthood as uniquely whatever, though it makes me think that when I wasn’t a parent, that nourishing sense of contribution was still a thing I sought and cultivated. I’d just have to get to the feeling of making the world better more mindfully and more deliberately. (Less ‘the baby needs to be fed! I can do that!’ And more ‘who needs to be fed, and what, and in what ways can I best help?’) I miss the leisure of thinking about how best to apply that energy and reward.

So, what’s coming for 2024?

This next year, I’ll be taking six weeks off from a date as yet TBD, but which will commence suddenly with a cramping feeling at some point in late Jan.

After that, when my work-life 2024 starts properly, I will be focusing on writing, podcasting, collaborating with interesting people on interesting projects, the launch of the now fully written D’Ancey LaGuarde book (when unbound gives me a publication date - which I AM chasing!) and community building, including here on Patreon. I want to figure out how best to give good things to as many people as possible. Maybe some video content, if you guys would be interested in me doing more on YouTube.

I’ve been loving the salons, and particularly the writers meetings and the one-on-one consultations; they nourish the part of me that was heading towards Academia when comedy started working out, so I want to do more of that kind of thing, possibly including a long weekend writers retreat somewhere on the Euro side of the world in August or September (the luxury of people being in a room together!).

I’ve probably forgotten some of the things I’d like to get done this year, but I’m sure they’ll occur to me.

I hope to see you at one of the Salons, Writers Meetings, one-on-one consultations, in my DMs or in real life some time this year.

Xx

Alice