Like anyone who suffers from chronic disorganisation knows, the hardest part is always how to begin. Where. After over a decade of gluttonous Tory-led austerity—which by its very expansion necessitated the shrinking of our material, emotional and spiritual lives—there are very few genuine choices in 2024 in the UK for how to go about living. From Palestine to Peterborough, we are all dying at the service of someone else’s ideology. But write? There are so many avenues, endless cycle paths in the mind, so many mis/directions (in all the best ways) to take. If we are truly present, then imagination cannot be controlled, cannot be ruled - and that has clear material consequences: it is exactly why no matter how many cruise ships the state converts into prisons or how many neocolonial deals are brokered with nation states elsewhere, people will continue to cross borders. It is why no matter how many CCTV cameras supermarkets install, people will continue to come up with ingenious ways to steal: sliding cheese into a closed umbrella, hiding butter in a rolled-up newspaper, dropping nappies into the baby buggy. It is why Palestine will be free. Whether in my lifetime or after, we will live differently, we will organise our lives differently, we will relate to one another differently; despite our best intentions. It is only easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism if you stop your imagination from doing exactly that. Like anyone who suffers from chronic disorganisation, I begin the 1st of January with the best of intentions. I am trying not to hold onto things so tightly. I am trying to be more courageous and more curious. I am trying to become more organised. I’m not going anywhere. But that also means I’m not budging from my position, I’m not readjusting my boundaries or my focus. But I am always ready to pivot: always prepared to stop, or redirect, any aspect of my living - to make sacrifices, in order to avoid this one long unconsensual compromise they call life in 2024 in the UK. I am sorry to all the people I haven’t called, haven’t replied to, have messaged in a burst of energy and then suddenly gone silent. This year was more disorganised than most, but also rewarding in so many ways. I hope that writing this can be part of how I let you know I am thinking of you. That I am wishing us into a year of poetry and of music, of meaning and focus, of friendship, of resistance, joy, vision and passion; all the things that we cannot yet imagine. We can bring them into being if we only let ourselves, and with each renewed sunrise we will learn to fail better than we did before.
More news coming soon. For now, Diane di Prima says it better than I ever could:
