Happy New Year yet again, constant reader! Welcome to my 2024, and to a short retrospective of my 2023 writing life, or actually, just my life.

Life not only goes on, and uh, finds a way, it gets in the way now and again, and this was especially the case for me for during 2023.

I lost my mum in May. I didn’t know that she was so ill, and only had a matter of days to find out, fly to see her, say my goodbyes and prepare for her funeral.I tried to process the indecent haste of dealing with her passing, and all my feelings about our relationship by bundling them into a box in a corner of my mind labelled “process this later”, but grief works to its own timetable, and I’ve struggled to even accept that she’s gone, never mind anything else.

My mum features a lot in my writing. A few years into my writing journey I realised that I had taken the old cliche of writing about what you know very much to heart; no matter what the setting, the genre, or the story, my very small family of birth are always there, somewhere, at the heart of my roster of characters, costumes, and personas.

I also faced up to some truths about my health after Christmas 2022, and made a commitment to get healthy (again) in 2023. I’d lost weight and been at my healthiest during 2019, but when Covid locked us down I faltered.In general my health is good, but my blood glucose levels were in the prediabetic range for too long, and I had to acknowledge my choice; commit to a healthy long life, or continue to make excuses for eating another chocolate bar, for perhaps a shorter amount of time. Now in my fifties I feel healthier than I have for twenty years; my resting heart rate is down 30%, my VO2 max is higher than average for my age, and my BMI is the lowest it’s been since I got married in the 90’s. I made simple changes and stuck with them, prioritising them every single day, even during very hard times such as my mum’s death.

Getting fit and healthy sounds great and understandable, and it is, but in attending to my physical and mental health, my writing took a back seat. Ideas didn’t – I’ve got a folder full of conversations, snippets and plots; they still come when they will (thankfully) – but I’ve got a backlog, and a challenge; to fit in my job, family, health, and my writing. If I could drop one, all would be well (sorry, job!) but for now I’m recommitting to the juggle. I’ve resubmitted some stories I’d shoved in a drawer, and I’m writing up all the notes for And The Buntings Flew; I promise myself that this story will be finished, and told.

The title for this post comes from a quote attributed to one of my favourite poets, Robert Frost: in 1954 the Sunday newspaper supplement “This Week Magazine” published an interview, “Robert Frost’s Secret” by Ray Josephs which (according to Josephs) included the following conversation:

“In all your years and all your travels,” I asked, “what do you think is the most important thing you’ve learned about life?”

He paused a moment, then with the twinkle sparkling under those brambly eyebrows he replied: “In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on. In all the confusions of today, with all our troubles . . . with politicians and people slinging the word fear around, all of us become discouraged . . . tempted to say this is the end, the finish. But life — it goes on. It always has. It always will. Don’t forget that.

I love Frost’s poems for their disarming simplicity, for their “tell it like it is”, sometimes even clichéd language, that artfully speaks to our inner and outer lives at the same time. We do all become discouraged at times, we do have to say goodbyes and steer through many troubles, but in the end, the truth is that life does go on, it always has and will, with or without us, so our only choice, to paraphrase another Frost poem, is to decide which road through the yellow woods we take, and then….take a step forward. I wish you all a very happy and productive New Year.

P.S. The header picture is a striking sculpture I pass now and again on my commute called “Polar Bear and Dogman wanted everyone to stay cool”, and can be found outside 5 More Place London SE1, across the road from London Bridge station. Click here for more info about Gillie and Marc’s art pieces in London and stay cool!