We all know that nothing good has ever come from a New Year's resolution. Nobody's success story ever starts with one of them. This is because January is by far the worst time to embark on any kind of bold new direction. A natural fork in the road will appear at some point in the year but it will do so unbidden and not in response to the cellophane wrapping being ripped away from a brand new calendar.

The main reasons why all these resolutions come a cropper is because people forget what an absolute bastard of a month January is. The lack of daylight, the weather, the financial aftermath of Christmas, the sudden geopolitical machinations that were put on pause for the festive period –⁠ it's not a time to venture forth, it's a time to hunker down and wait for it all to blow over.

I gave up on resolutions many years ago, but if I was to make one resolution it would be to make it through January without feeling like a massive failure. That means doing some resolution-adjacent things such as watching my spending, getting some exercise and getting outside more, but doing it in a more lowkey and less urgent way.

Resolutions are the backwash of a sustained period of excess. Overeating, overspending, boozing and sloth. Midwinter has always been an occasion to stave off the darkness with or without its casual Christian wrapping. One problem with midwinter is that it doesn't feel like it's in the middle, it might be the time for the winter solstice but it tends to be a two-month slog before the daffodils and magnolias bloom. Our big ideas for the year ahead never seem to account for that slog. You wouldn't necessarily put a starting line for a marathon at the bottom of a massive hill. You'd be better off putting on your hiking boots and shelving your running shoes for another day.

I wouldn't feel comfortable telling you or anyone else how to get through your own personal January hell so here's how got through mine.

One thing that a lot of us have is a kind of library, whether it's a stack of unread books or unplayed games, most of us are harbouring or hoarding some kind of surplus. I've lost count of all the times I've bought something because it was on sale or because I thought there might be a time when I have more of a use for it.

Well, now is definitely that time. Also, if you're a gamer, you might notice I used the word library instead of "backlog". The idea of the backlog seems to be a case of the gamer mentality overstraying into how we think about the games themselves, as little side missions to tick off rather than experiences worth having. A library is not something to be ploughed through or completed, it is a store of information and experiences. I'm currently reading the Zhaungzhi and playing Fallout 3, both of which have been on my to-read and to-play list since I bought them a few years back. So my days are swinging between contemplating the emperor's chef whose butcher knife slides effortless between the joints of a carcass before the pieces simply fall away from each other and the next moment … I’m blowing away wasteland supermutants with a very imprecise and indiscriminating shotgun. I had no idea this would be the cultural tenor of my January but that's what I randomly chose when poring over my collections. What strange little presents the past me lined up for the present me.

Another thing that gets me through the winter slog is the quality of the skies. I don't know if it's because the sun never makes it to the same heights as its midsummer zenith, meaning that the light and shadows never stray into flatness as when the sun is directly ahead. It could also be the clarity of the cold air. Winter light doesn't seem to hang around for too long but it does a lot of strange and wonderful things while it's around. The skies of mid-to-late winter often find their way into my poems, but this time I ended up writing about something that gave the January sky a right of reply instead.

what the january sky is trying to tell us

You are all more connected than you think you are,
intricately, fundamentally, blindly,
yes, even you, little rock dweller,
feeling like you’re trapped inside
the tiny little rock of your skull.

You may think that I have my own edges,
but even the flat earthers know that’s not true,
my edges are really the edges formed at the bottom
of a gravity well, and even these edges
are not enough, you have to keep at it,
drawing more lines between
your self-shell and the horizon,
as flags erupt at varying frequencies
like pustules on sunburnt skin.

I remember when the only sign of you
was a flicker from a few thousand
cave mouths, but then the fires escaped
and became constellations, and then copper
wires made way for transatlantic
fibreoptic cables, and the little lights
bloomed ever more, each raised by a palm
to a restless, excitable gaze.

You’ve barely been here a moment
and you’re not looking too likely to
stick around for the big finale,
when your rock is swallowed
by a yawing sun and I stop being a sky
and continue being what I always was –⁠

a vastness that you sometimes felt
within and without, despite all
the lines you drew between things,
a blameless, blank bliss
that you never took the time
to listen to.

Subscribe now

The second week of January also presents a little festival of life and death for me, a three-day stretch that I like to observe as Bowie-mas. As you probably already know, Bowie’s birth and death days are two days apart (8th and 10th of January). This normally involves me listening to to his 60s-70s work on the first day, his less celebrated 80s-90s stuff on the second and his 2000’s albums on the third day. At the same time, I took a moment to stand in front of his mural in Brixton for a minute or so on the middle day, because I had a feeling it wouldn’t be too busy. I didn’t stay too long because it was pissing down with rain and the longer I spent there, the more I thought about how the mural had barely been there a couple of years when Bowie died and that it probably was an unwitting ally in the gentrification of Brixton. I did a bit of filming and then went home and wrote a poem about it:

On Bowie and Brixton

Some little omens have emerged to indicate that the great gentrification project might have stalled –⁠⁠
the whoozy rat pottering a few inches away from my footfall, skirting the bases of a series of permanently locked shutters before finding a crag to vanish into.
The butchers, wholesalers and cheap cookware shops keep on keeping on while the bougie boutiques replace each other to little fanfare.
I’m grateful for the better coffee but not so much for the hikes in rent.
Nobody who frequented Champagne + Fromage had to fight for their place here and nobody fought for it to remain.
None of them caught a truncheon to the temple in their mission to make this area feel nicer.

I remember the Fridays and Saturdays in the early 00s when I was too skint for a single pint, so I marched about for a couple of hours, as I once did in the suburbs,
to soak up all the noise and vibes I could before I skulked back to my flat to see if a poem would hatch,
so that the locals could endure my open-mic edgelordism like they endured everything else.
I never headed out with the intent of making friends, but am grateful that a few were found regardless.

Bowie was never a part of what drew me here, and even now, as much as I love his music,
his presence feels as thin as a layer of spray paint on a wall that locals have scrawled on for decades,
but, on this day between his birthday and deathday, it feels like the perfect time to pause before his perspex shielded boat race,
to stand stock still in the pouring rain,
before I shuffle on from Marks and Sparks to Poundland.

One final thing that got me into gear for the January blues was starting something off in December. This means that, when January comes round, whatever thing I started in December doesn’t feel like a resolution, it feels like something that I was doing already. In this particular case, I started making videos again. Rather than making video essays, I instead started filming things while I was out and occasionally talking to the camera. This footage was then further edited around voiceover recordings of the poems that I’d written at the time. They’re basically hybrids of poem films and vlogs. The results are bit janky, as befits the level of my videography skills, but I’m going to plough on and see what happens. Here are the first two:

So, that’s how I got through January. I don’t think I did that bad, but must admit that things got a bit fraught at the end.

How about you, do you have any January strategies that helped out in any way? Or are you one of those nutters who makes resolutions and sees them through to the bitter end? Feel free to leave a comment if the answer is yes to any of the above.

Thanks for reading this!

Niall