2022: Year In Review
We come to the end of another year and thus to the start of another look back over the last twelve months. As I write this now I am on only a few hours sleep after some post-Christmas lurgy entered our lives and disturbed last evening’s slumber. This morning was spent driving tiredly and hurriedly back from Ipswich, where we were staying with family, to home, where we can crash out on the sofa, or in bed, and give in to illness. I have only just now - at 1.30pm - had my first coffee of the day. This coffee, in the last week, has become my only coffee of the day, after spending most of 2022 on a minimum of three double espresso-laced americanos a day, so it’s absence has been felt! As luck would have it, I decided at the start of December to cut it down to only two double espresso-laced americanos a day, because I felt constantly wired and on edge and was having trouble sleeping. I call this lucky because, the week before Christmas, my blood pressure was measured and found to be scarily high thanks to a bad relapse with my anxiety. (The last time I found myself a few weeks away from starting a new job after a writing sabbatical my dad died, suddenly and unexpectedly. It turns out this last fortnight in a similar position has been a bit of a trigger!) To reduce the blood pressure, as well as seeking ways of reducing the anxiety, I am trying to reduce salt intake and caffeine. No mean feat at Christmastime! Don’t worry: I still enjoyed all the usual Christmas salts and fats, there has just been a little less indulgence in the leftovers than usual. But having already weaned myself off a third of my coffee habit in the weeks before, it was definitely less difficult to chip away at the other third and go down to just one coffee a day. This morning though, in an unfamiliar kitchen, for want of a teaspoon, I ditched the morning coffee I sought to make and opted for a peppermint tea instead. Delicious. Calming. But completely lacking in caffeine. A mistake!
So with very little energy and a wife sleeping off illness upstairs, I decided to sit in a chair, barely move, and think back on the last twelve months. Probably one of the most significant years of my life.
I mean the very first thing I did on New Year’s Day 2022 was quit my job of eleven years. It was epoch changing! In that single, brief, email I opened up a world of radical possibility and autonomous agency that had been missing from all those previous years. I was not only free to embark on whatever new adventures I might want to experiment with in 2022, but was no longer bound to bite my tongue at work. I could be unashamedly myself and to hell with any consequences. A very freeing feeling indeed and, I think to my credit, a freedom that I did not abuse. Just one which reminded me of my final teenage years growing up in a dysfunctional family with parents on the verge of a divorce that never quite seemed to happen. Due to go to university that October, I responded to every family tension that arose while I was still under their roof with the peaceful knowledge that it wouldn’t be my problem anymore: soon I would be living in Cardiff. Likewise, 2022 at work meant I was able to see and hear things which had grown to irritate and frustrate me about the school, take a deep breath, and know that come September they wouldn’t be my problem anymore. A wonderful gift.
At the same time, 2022’s stress levels, though reduced in that way, were still added to immensely by the uncertainty of what comes next? It was all good and well to quit a job I no longer wanted, but with no new job lined up and only a rough idea of possible future employment - not even sure if I wanted to stay a teacher - the freedom of that email also became the burden of trying to find another job in a completely different field: academia. One which, throughout the course of the year, and right by the time I finally left my old school for the very last time, I came to realise I didn’t actually want! Whatever my idle fantasies might have been of a career as a university philosopher, reality, it turned out, was a far uglier picture that seemed to have even more downsides than the job I was walking away from. When I spoke to academics about my concerns, their universal advice was that I was right, and that I should avoid moving into higher education like the plague. The blog post I wrote about why I was quitting my job was read by many, and several of the readers were academics, who wrote to me to tell me how much my thoughts resonated with what they were feeling themselves, stuck in their current positions. Out of the frying pan and into the fire!
Still - revelation about what you don’t want to do is just as important as revelation about what you do want. Throughout it all, I never regretted (except financially, of course, during a cost of living crisis!) leaving my old job, and was as clear that I had to get out of there when I did as I was about not wanting to return to academia. But it did mean that, for me, 2022 turned out to be an incredibly melancholy year. Lots of heavy-hearted moments in my last months in my classroom saying both silent and non-silent goodbyes to the cohort of students I would be abandoning and colleagues I knew I would be unlikely to ever see again, followed by a sense of restlessness and uncertainty about what to do. And then there was all the wasted time applying for academic jobs that I didn’t get and, with hindsight, wouldn’t have wanted if I had. As well as time spent brushing up on my specialist knowledge that, really, I didn’t need to have.
At the same time, there was a surge in productivity. During my sabbatical between September and December, I completed about half a book’s worth of my research project on prisons, schools, punishment and ideology that I have been working on part-time since January, as well as a complete a whole other book I had been messing about with since the summer. I released a new ep of music (and if you haven’t seen it already, check out this old-school lockdown bedroom gig I did earlier this month of new and old songs: https://youtu.be/a8b55sqEqck), wrote my series of Sabbatical blogs, including a new comic every week, and since January I have written a new Philosophy Unleashed blog post every week during the school term. I have philosophy papers under consideration at various academic journals and even a few poems knocking about in some poetry competitions I’ve entered. I have also helped work on a new podcast for A-level philosophy, helped organise the fledgling Association for Philosophy Teacher’s inaugural conference, and embarked on some interesting work and conversations with various scholars and the exam board to try and push along further diversification and decolonisation of the A-level Philosophy course. As always, I’ve read voraciously,
Or - in LIST form - (those in bold were my top books of 2022 and some I am still reading slowly as I go, a few pages or chapters every now and then, others I tapped out on and decided not to finish. Those books are noted in parenthesis).
1. Craig Adams: The Six Secrets of Intelligence: What Your Education Failed to Teach You
2. Tony Nourmand: A Small Book of Jewish Comedians
3. Armando Iannucci: Pandemonium
4. Cold War Steve: Cold War Steve – Journal of The Plague Year
5. Michael Showalter: Guys Can Be Cat Ladies Too
6. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Frankenstein: The 1818 Text
7. Keith Broomfield: If Rivers Could Sing
8. Rebecca Solnit: A Field Guide to Getting Lost (ongoing)
9. Campbell F. Scribner: Spare the Rod: Punishment and the Moral Community of Schools
10. Henry Rollins: Stay Fanatic!!! Hectic Expectorations For The Music Obsessive (Vol. 1)
11. Stephen King: Billy Summers
12. Barney Hoskyns: Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits
13. Colson Whitehead : Sag Harbor
14. Shon Faye: The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice
15. Mel Brooks: All about Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business
16. Richard Lange: Rovers (tapped out on)
17. Jonathan Coe: The Rotters' Club (tapped out on)
18. Ryan Holiday: The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living (ongoing)
19. Richard Beard: Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England
20. James Smythe: The Edge
21. Nick Drnaso: Beverly
22. Charlie LeDuff: Work and Other Sins: Life in New York City and Thereabouts
23. Jonathan Coe: Mr Wilder & Me
24. Masha Gessen: Surviving Autocracy
25. Ali Smith: Companion Piece
26. Clare Mac Cumhaill: Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life
27. Angela Y. Davis: Abolition. Feminism. Now.
28. Angela Y. Davis: Angela Davis: An Autobiography
29. Anthony Veasna So: Afterparties
30. Marian Keyes: Grown Ups
31. Hiromi Kawakami: People From My Neighbourhood
32. Sally Rooney: Beautiful World, Where Are You
33. Adrian Tomine: 32 Stories: The Complete Optic Nerve Mini-Comics
34. Judith Butler: The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political
35. Adrian Tomine: Shortcomings
36. Roddy Doyle: The Snapper (The Barrytown Trilogy, #2)
37. Luke Healy : Permanent Press
38. Stephen King: Needful Things
39. Ancco: Nineteen
40. Jillian Tamaki: Boundless
41. Jonathan Franzen: Crossroads
42. Keith Ridgway: A Shock
43. Lily Blakely : Gristle
44. Adrian Tomine: Sleepwalk and Other Stories
45. Tom Gauld: Revenge of the Librarians
46. Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black
47. Jana Casale: How to Fall Out of Love Madly
48. Douglas Edwards: Philosophy Smackdown
49. Lewis R. Gordon: Fear of Black Consciousness
50. bell hooks: All About Love: New Visions
51. Phil Stokes : Clive Barker’s Dark Worlds
52. bell hooks: Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope
53. Eric LaRocca: Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes
54. Daphne du Maurier: My Cousin Rachel
55. S.R. Masters: The Trial
56. Candice Carty-Williams: People Person
57. Luke Healy : The Con Artists
58. Jeffrey Boakye: I Heard What You Said
59. Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama
60. James Joyce: Ulysses (tapped out on)
61. L.J. Ross: Holy Island (DCI Ryan Mysteries, #1)
62. Naoise Dolan: Exciting Times
63. John Waters: Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance
64. Amelia Horgan: Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism
65. Richard Osman: The Man Who Died Twice (Thursday Murder Club, #2)
66. Sophie Yanow: The Contradictions
67. Simone de Beauvoir: The Inseparables
68. Clare Chambers: Small Pleasures
69. Paul Tremblay: The Pallbearers Club (tapped out on)
70. Victor Jestin: Heatwave
71. P.G. Wodehouse: Thank You, Jeeves (Jeeves, #5)
72. Lin Anderson: The Party House
73. Keith Brymer Jones: Boy in a China Shop: Life, Clay and Everything
74. Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses
75. Rumaan Alam: Leave the World Behind
76. Andy West: The Life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Philosophy
77. John Waters: Mr Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder
78. Tommie Shelby: The Idea of Prison Abolition (ongoing)
79. Gabor Maté: The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture (ongoing)
80. Skye Cleary: How to Be You: Simone de Beauvoir and the art of authentic living (ongoing)
81. Gordon Brown: Seven Ways to Change the World: How To Fix The Most Pressing Problems We Face
82. Mark Thomas: 50 Things About Us
83. Nancy Campbell: Fifty Words for Snow
84. Holly Matthews: The Happy Me Project: The no-nonsense guide to self-development:
85. A J Ayer: The Central Questions of Philosophy
86. Greg Graffin: Punk Paradox: A Memoir
87. Paul Merton: Only When I Laugh: My Autobiography
88. Nick Cave: Faith, Hope and Carnage (ongoing)
89. James Smythe: The Ends
90. Jostein Gaarder: The Christmas Mystery
91. Michael Connelly: Desert Star (ongoing - just started reading)
and I have taught all kinds of new and interesting things - both online and in person - in all kinds of new and interesting schools. To cap it all off, I start the new year with a new teaching job and a renewed love of teaching. All that plus finishing out my duties at my old job until July, getting a great set of exam results, and having the storybook ending of having a former student of mine become my successor in the role. Not a bad year professionally considering I was unemployed for a whole quarter of it!
Personally, too, 2022 has been an adventurous year. The freedom in my career opened my normally habit-driven, risk-averse, and comfort-zone-entrenched mind to possibilities of where we might live and what we might do differently that have made the future for my wife and I much more interesting. Although for now we’ll stay where we are and where we’re happy, we both a very open to travel and career-experimentation in ways I never was previously. We’ve had some lovely travels around the UK, enjoying the Lake District, Scotland, and Derbyshire especially, and envisioning new possible lives somewhere greener, or more vibrant, than the beige suburban comfort in which we currently live. We love our lives and we love our current home, but we haven’t ever really felt connected to the area or like we really fit in. We’ve kind of just leaned into that more this year and decided to own it. Be who we are unapologetically, and also think about finding our tribe - or our lack of tribe - elsewhere one day instead.
2022 is also the year we both, completely unexpectedly, got really into football. Women’s football specifically, from the Lionesses at the Euros to becoming season ticket holders for Aston Villa. I’ve seen more football in the last six months than I have in the last twenty-six years! And although as a child and early teenager my dad used to drag me along to watch Bury FC or Aston Villa or Coventry quite regularly in order to share his love of the beautiful game and try and get me interested, the matches of the last six months have been matches I have actively chosen to watch and have truly enjoyed! A huge change. And, yes, watching the women’s game has also got us interested in the men too. We actually watch Match of the Day now and have paid exorbitant SKY prices to watch a single match! Despite the ethical awfulness, the World Cup in Qatar this month is the first World Cup I’ve ever watched from the group stages all the way to the final, and the only other World Cup I’ve actually been excited about since Italia ‘90! Some weeks I have even watched more football than I have wrestling. Unthinkable in 2021, or any year since I first discovered Wrestlemania in 1992!
We’ve also indulged in other hobbies. My wife, her pottery, and me, my Tai Chi. A year of learning and playing, as well as dreaming and manifesting. I could not have done this year without my amazing wife, not only financially, her income funding my sabbatical months, but the moral support and encouragement she gave me to be brave enough to get out and to follow my dreams, even if they led to a dead end. What an amazing women! She always pushes me to try new things and face my fears and anxieties so I can overcome them. There’s nothing I think I can do that she doesn’t encourage. After so many years of marriage, and a whole period of our relationship together before that, it would be easy for some to simply take that for granted. But I see other people, other couples, and know that what we have is something rare and special, something deserving of gratitude and acknowledgement. 2022 has sadly also seen others we know be not so lucky in their relationships. That we are still happy, and that our favourite thing to do is to still spend time with each other, laughing, chatting, and sharing both the mundanity and transcendent moments from our days, is the sort of thing those who believe might call a ‘blessing’. Likewise, that we got to spend so much time across the year visiting with my sister, her partner, and our new niece in London, including giving her her very first proper Christmas this week, is similar fodder for the moniker of ‘blessed’. There are other siblings who don’t have such a good relationship. Other Aunts, Uncles, Nephews and Nieces. Hell, I even have another sister myself that I’ve only ever met once and a niece I’ve seen only ever on Facebook! That my sister and I get on so well, and that we love spending time with our niece is another thing in 2022 which could be overlooked but deserves its acknowledgment.
2022 has also been cool because it has been the year we finally gave up trying to float against the grain and succumbed, at last, to the UK delusion that covid no longer exists. In other words, teaching without a mask again finally, and going back out into the world for meals out and collective gatherings. We went to a hotel for my birthday in January - a wonderful weekend getaway to the Lake District - and never really looked back. We saw artists like Bad Religion, Lady Gaga, Mark Thomas, Adam Buxton, Rose Matefeo, and The Divine Comedy; Art exhibitions at the Tate, The Barbican, and The National Gallery; theatre like Straight Line Crazy, Jerusalem, & Juliet, Eureka Day, Life of Pi, The Collaboration, Back to the Future: The Musical, and A Christmas Carol at the RSC; Jurassic World: The Exhibition; and sporting events like Wimbledon and all those Villa matches! And that’s just the stuff I remember sat here tired and barely caffeinated. There was probably more, but after doing none of that sort of thing since March 2020 it’s been great to have culture and shared gatherings back in our lives (even if some of them legitimately did give us covid in the end!)
We watched a lot, we read a lot, we did a lot - our three weeks in Scotland will be forever etched in our memories - and, for me, I really feel I gave myself permission in 2022 to be more me. To be the person I want to be, rather than the person I was becoming or had been trapped as for too long (and I’m not just talking about a few more tattoos and dying my hair pink, but I’m also not not talking about those things either).
I’m still a work in progress - aren’t we all - but 2022 has given me the space and opportunity to enter 2023 better, and start the new year in a far more positive place than I was a year ago. Lower stress, lower blood pressure, lower bullshit, and much more kindness, open-mindedness, gratitude and going with the flow.
A few years ago I wrote a song called ‘Bursting From The Grave’. It begins: ‘Just as fucked up as I ever was. Maybe fucked up a little more?’ I think that lyric is as good a way to end, and start, another year as any. The world is going to shit. That much is obvious. I think in 2023 the focus will be on making sure as much of my world as possible is about contributing to the good that remains, and the possibilities for hope, rather than being sucked into the narratives that are undoing civilisation and progress one angry tweet at a time. Fighting the good fight through living example, rather than worrying about winning or losing arguments that are getting us nowhere.
That, and writing an entirely electronic album on a MIDI keyboard without bass and guitar, just to see if I can!
So goodbye 2022, and hello to 2023 (when it finally arrives). Like every year that has ever been before it and any that might come after - it is sure to be interesting if nothing else.