2023: Year In Review
Every year I force myself to look back and take stock on the last twelve months. I guess it’s a sort of therapy as much as it is a superstitious ritual at this point. The year doesn’t quite feel complete without doing it, and nor do I. It’s a way of saying goodbye to what has happened and also of looking ahead. Getting my head in order to face the next calendar year and also completing a familiar ritual that feels like it might bring good tidings for what’s next. Like the tradition of ‘first-footing’ on January 1st but without all the baked-in prejudice about hair-colour and gender. December arrives and with it comes Christmas, fairy lights, and a burning need to reflect. My driving instructor always told me to check my mirrors before moving forward and I guess the advice stuck.
So let’s look in the mirror. It’s been quite a year, after all. A new job, a new book, a new album released in a whole new style of music for me... Not to mention finally getting on a plane again for the first time since Covid and returning to America for the first time since 2018 not once, but twice! Considering I started 2022 quitting my job of eleven years and believing I was quitting the entire profession of teaching, and ended 2022 deep in the throes of a returning health anxiety disorder that had me convinced I was going to die before the year was out, to be here in December of 2023, happy working as a teacher again and looking towards New Year’s Eve only worried this year about whether or not I will be able to read as many books as I’d like to before returning to work in January, that’s a pretty big fucking win!
For those interested - the books I read in 2023 are as follows:
1.How to Be You: Simone de Beauvoir and the art of authentic living - Skye Cleary
2. Brick By Brick: How We Build a World Without Prisons - Cradle Community
3. Black Skin, White Masks (Penguin Modern Classics) - Frantz Fanon
4. Swamplandia! - Karen Russell
5. A Field Guide to Getting Lost - Rebecca Solnit
6. The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead
7. Miami - Joan Didion
8. The Other Side of the Bay - Sean Dietrich
9. Tourist Season - Carl Hiaasen
10. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook - Sara Ahmed
11. The Apparition Phase - Will Maclean
12. Florida Roadkill (Serge Storms, #1) - Tim Dorsey
13. Sic - Henry Rollins
14. Oxygen Mask: A Graphic Novel - Jason Reynolds
15. The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Hemingway Library Collector's Edition - Ernest Hemingway
16. Number One Is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions - Steve Martin
17. Hello, Molly!: A Memoir - Molly Shannon
18. The Nineties - Chuck Klosterman
19. How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind - Regan Penaluna
20. A Hardcore Heart: Adventures in a D.I.Y. Scene - David Gamage
21. How to Sell a Haunted House - Grady Hendrix
22. Nimrod - Ryan Roberts
23. Directions to the outskirts of town: Punk Rock Tour Diaries - Welly Artcore
24. Anarchist Atheist Punk Rock Teacher: A Memoir of Struggle, Grief, Philosophy and Hope - DaN McKee
25. Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta - James Hannaham
26. The Pillowman - Martin McDonagh
27. The God Desire - David Baddiel
28. Yellowface - R.F. Kuang
29. Summer Blonde - Adrian Tomine
30. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, #1) - Satoshi Yagisawa
31. Convenience Store Woman - Sayaka Murata
32. I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki - Baek Se-hee
33. Uncommon Type: Some Stories - Tom Hanks
34. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands - Kate Beaton
35. Bicycle Diaries - David Byrne
36. Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, #1) - Robin Sloan
37. We Move - Gurnaik Johal
38. Severance - Ling Ma
39. Last Winter We Parted - Fuminori Nakamura
40. The Every (The Circle, #2) - Dave Eggers
41. The Bullet That Missed (Thursday Murder Club, #3) - Richard Osman
42. Driftnet (Rhona MacLeod #1) - Lin Anderson
43. For You and Only You (You, #4) - Caroline Kepnes
44. Silence is No Reaction: Forty Years of Subhumans - Ian Glasper
45. Carry On, Jeeves (Jeeves, #3) - P.G. Wodehouse
46. The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World - James Ball
47. A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara
48. Letters From Prison: On Societal Freedom - Theodore Keloglou
49. The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel - Louise Michel
50. Sycamore Gap (DCI Ryan Mysteries, #2) - L.J. Ross
51. Six Months In 1977 - Kit McQuinn
52. Sigh, Gone: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In - Phuc Tran
53. Into the Uncanny - Danny Robins
54. Parables, Fables, Nightmares - Malachi McIntosh
55. Abolishing Carceral Society (Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics) - Abolition Collective
56. Try Anarchism for Life: The Beauty of Our Circle - Cindy Milstein
57. A Woman's Game: The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Women's Football - Suzanne Wrack
58. Holly - Stephen King
59. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World - Naomi Klein
60. The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War - Jeff Sharlet
61. Death and Papa Noël (Follet Valley Mysteries, #2.5) - Ian Moore
62. The Christmas Appeal (The Appeal, #1.5) - Janice Hallett
63. He Used Thought as a Wife. An Anthology of Poems and Conversations (From Inside). - Tim Key
64. The Philosophy of Modern Song - Bob Dylan
65. Chill Tidings: Dark Tales of the Christmas Season (Tales of the Weird) - Tanya Kirk (Ed)
66. Before Your Memory Fades (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, #3) - Toshikazu Kawaguchi
67. Acting Class - Nick Drnaso
68. Desert Star (Bosch #24) - Michael Connelly
69. Faith, Hope and Carnage - Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan
70. Rave - Jessica Campbell
71. The Man I Think I Know - Mike Gayle
72. The Storyteller - Dave Grohl
73. Uncomfortably Happily - Yeon-Sik Hong
74. Spirits of the Season - Tanya Kirk (Ed)
75. Christmas and other Horrors - Ellen Datlow (Ed)
I end 2023 with a predominant feeling of gratitude. Daily I am reminded of how lucky I am. How could I not feel lucky waking up each morning next to a wife I not only still love after all these years, but whom I still like too? We both know others who do not feel the same way about their spouses. We hear people groan about the prospects of a long car-drive with their partner, or a long holiday together, or even an additional evening. People who have little in common with their significant other any more and dread spending too long in each other’s company. Such people are common. But all we ever want is to spend as much time together as possible. A long car journey together is a joy. The audiobooks we think we’ll need to fill the hours seldom ever get played as we still find so much to talk about even after nearly twenty years together. Holidays - even weekends - are always too short, and the conversation never runs dry. To have that kind of relationship and not feel grateful in a world of divorce, separation, and quiet domestic misery would be a crime. My wedding ring has engraved on it ‘Luckiest Man’ and every anniversary that passes - both our wedding one, and the one each December from the date we first got together - I never stop feeling lucky. Everything else that happens in a year is just a bonus so long as I still have that for twelve more months. And that’s before I even mention the cat! We thought we might lose him about a month ago. He got really sick and he’s not a young kitten anymore. It turns out he had an overactive thyroid and is on medication for it now, doing much better. Again though - waking up to that little guy’s meows, even at three in the morning when he doesn’t understand that it isn’t time to get up yet, makes it hard not to feel like you’ve already won before your feet even touch the floor. Larry Miller was right when he said ‘If you walked out of bed today, and had a job to go to, and a home to come back to, and someone there who cares about you? Folks, the game’s over, and you’ve won.’
When I think about my change in circumstances regarding my job this year, it is only because my wife was so supportive and understanding that I was able to take the time off last year to get to this place. The book too. It was written during that sabbatical she enabled. The album - well guess who got me the synthesiser I wrote it on and encouraged all those evenings working on new songs? And when we travel anywhere - America or any other destination - it’s not me who plans the trip, it’s her. So the gratitude to my wife and the role she plays in my life extends across this whole review.
I am also grateful for the welcome I received at my new job. Starting in January, in a very different context from my last place of employment, I was on a temporary maternity contract and genuinely had no idea if I wanted it to last the whole three terms, let alone become permanent. The idea of going back to a school again - a different school, but any school - was exciting, but it was also full of a certain sense of failure. I had, after all, quit my job to quit teaching. To be returning again so soon was perhaps an admission of defeat? And what if the pastures new ended up feeling exactly the same as the last place? What if, now I thought I had realised that I really did want to stay in teaching, I just found myself back in the same situation I had thought I had escaped?
I had a lot of anxiety on that first day. Would the new department accept me? Would the new students? Would I be miserable? But from that first INSET morning on I was welcomed with open arms. As the term went on, I met my students, met more and more colleagues, and the anxiety was replaced with something old and unfamiliar: enjoyment. I was enjoying teaching again. I was enjoying the new challenges of a new place and I was enjoying getting to know new people and finding different ways of doing things. I was enjoying going to work! By the end of that first term all thoughts of leaving as soon as possible had gone from my head and I was hoping that the school might still need me to stick around in some capacity once the person I was covering returned. When it turned out that she wasn’t returning at all (little did I know she had been doing an epic hour-plus commute to work each way each day, a time-suck which having a baby had put into perspective and made her decide to work closer to home) I not only was interested in continuing the role permanently, I wanted it so much that having to actually compete for the role in an open interview process brought back my anxiety with a bang. Now I was anxious that I might have to leave, not that I would not want to stay. A welcome change.
And a happy ending: I got the job.
Suddenly, as the academic year reached it’s end in the summer, I was back in a position of professional and financial security after the economic uncertainty of taking a sabbatical at the height of a cost-of-living crisis. And most importantly, I was doing something meaningful and fulfilling again, and it didn’t feel like I was just hitting my head against a wall. 2023 had a lot of stuff happen, but as it marked the first of what I hope will be many future years at this new job, the start of this particular chapter in my life seems like one of the most significant things to remember about the last twelve months.
The second most significant thing has to be the publication of my book, Anarchist Atheist Punk Rock Teacher. When I started writing the thing in the summer of 2022, it was another form of literary therapy. Sifting the thoughts and experiences of the previous twelve years of teaching and trying to make sense of where I’d come from and where I was going. That it was written and, dare I say it, good, made me think it might be something I’d like other people to read and not just something for personal processing and reflection, but I wasn’t sure if I was just being delusional. After all - I am no one. Just a teacher who nobody knows. Why would anyone want to read about my life outside of my extended family? But through a happy coincidence I found a publisher who told me I wasn’t delusional. I’d first discovered Earth Island Books because two people whose ‘zines I used to write for - Tim Cundle/ Mass Movement and Welly Artcore - had their books published by them. Then at some point in late 2022 or early 2023 I heard the same publisher were collaborating with anarchist publishers, PM Press, to release Ian Glasper’s history of one of my favourite and formative punk bands, Subhumans. I pre-ordered the book. There were some delays in printing and David, the Earth Island publisher, very kindly sent out his own book, A Hardcore Heart, as a stopgap to enjoy while awaiting the Subs book to arrive. A history of his involvement in the UK punk scene of the 1990s, I read it and wondered: Hmmm…a book about a punk no-one really knows reminiscing on an important part of their personal lives, originally written as a personal history project and published in conjunction with an anarchist publisher…maybe worth getting in touch…
So I did. I sent David the manuscript and asked what he thought and suddenly my second book was being published. Something very different from the formal philosophical work of Authentic Democracy. Much more personal and raw. If people didn’t like Authentic Democracy, it was likely they were merely rejecting the argument for anarchism I had put forward. If people didn’t like Anarchist Atheist Punk Rock Teacher though, then they wouldn’t be liking me! That the publisher liked it was a good sign, and I felt confident the book would speak to people if they gave it a chance.
It was quite the whirlwind from proposal to print. Only a couple of months - April to June - and incredibly DIY. I hadn’t expected to design the cover myself and was surprised when the mock-up I’d proposed from Procreate on my iPad became the actual thing used - but hey, why not? To suddenly have a physical paperback in my hand of those words I’d started writing not even a year before reminded me that the publishing industry doesn’t have to move at the snail’s pace it usually does. A thought that has stuck with me throughout the year as an academic paper I wrote at the start of 2022 and sent off to a journal in March of that year, had sent back for revisions and resubmitted in June of 2022 only got accepted for publication a year later, in June of this year, and is due to finally see the light of day nearly two years after it was first written, at the end of this month!
That said, the speed and ease of DIY punk publishing can sometimes be offset by its inevitable lack of a marketing budget and the difficulty of getting actual human eyes on the book. I am so proud of Anarchist Atheist Punk Rock Teacher but so far reviews - though good when they come - have been extremely limited. A problem may well be that when the book did come out, it coincided with the long awaited (and, aforementioned, delayed) Subhumans book. If I were a reviewer sent a pile of books from Earth Island, I certainly know which of the two I’d pick up first - and coming in at over 600 pages it takes a while to get through the Subhumans tome. Easy for my book to slip to the bottom of a review pile. I’d love to get some more reviews for the book coming in in 2024 because those who have read it - especially teachers, or students - have been really positive about it. A lot of teachers I know have been passing it on to colleagues and friends and taking great solace or advice from it. A few, I know, have actively transformed their professional lives as a result of reading it. But none of these people are fanzine reviewers or professional book reviewers. Those sort of reviews - important for pull-quotes and marketing - have been mostly radio silent except for the odd one here and there. That’s what I need more of! Still, the DIY marketing has been fun and I loved attending the anarchist book fairs in London and Manchester this autumn, as well as Peterborough’s radical book fair. It was good meeting a lot of fellow anarchist teachers out there, struggling with the education system and working to make it better where we can between the cracks. I just wish I was able to do more of that stuff. Ironically, the busy job of being a teacher - even an anarchist, atheist, punk rock one - makes it difficult to find the time.
It is my hope for 2024 that I get back out into the world performing music again. I envision doing shows with my bass guitar, as I was doing on the singer/songwriter scene in the post-Bullet of Diplomacy years, but hopefully in more welcoming venues than I played back then (i.e. places where a bit of aggressive, bass-driven punk isn’t seen as an affront to the senses on an otherwise acoustic guitar led night). I want to hawk my books as merch after the shows. So far I don’t know where such venues might be and really how to go about getting involved in live music again, having been totally removed from the scene since the end of my band days, but I think it’s an important new year’s resolution to make and one which will bring me a lot of fulfilment. My music is weird, unique and good. And currently in the world barely anyone knows about it (believe me - I get all the Spotify/Bandcamp/Distrokid metrics - I know exactly how unlistened-to most of my songs are!) It would be nice for more people to hear it and not just play to myself in a little room at home.
That said, 2023 will forever be the year that I wrote my first solo album completely on a keyboard synthesiser. Playing With Electricity, released under my own name, was a twelve month labour of love that saw me mess about on an Arturia KeyLab 49 and Logic Pro and write and record a brand new song every month. Essentially a diary of my year - at least emotionally - I’m really happy with how it all turned out and the creativity I got to express with it. A totally different kind of music than I play on my bass and something I want to continue experimenting with going forward. It was a great way of letting off steam each month too - to reach a total flow-state and forget about marking, planning, exams, and all the teaching bullshit that can get a bit much and just get lost in creating a song. I work well to self-imposed deadlines and ridiculous invented obligations and this album is a testament to that. Speaking of such self-imposed creative deadlines, I guess I am also proud that Philosophy Unleashed survived yet another year with absolutely no submissions from anyone else. I managed to publish a brand new bit of philosophy every Monday during term time despite juggling the demands of a brand new job, promoting a new book, and writing an entire album in my spare time. The blog has now been running for four years without fail. Insane. Another mad labour of love for the hundred or so people who actually look at it each week. As always - the reviews are minimal. Comments are infrequent and I have no idea if people even like what I’m doing there. I am constantly shouting into the void, as the lyrics for my July song on Playing With Electricity made clear:
Isn’t it funny how long we wait
For so very little?
Shouting out our words loudly into the dark
Sharing ourselves into the void
Hoping for an echo back
To at least acknowledge all the effort
Put into making a sound
But once again I find myself waiting
And hearing only the rush of blood
In my ears
That greets
That greets my noise
How many signals do you need
Before you start to pay attention?
That there are no connections to be made.
No kindred spirits out there.
That your singular voice speaks only
To itself
And though you know you’d do it anyway
Even if nobody cared
You can’t bring yourself to admit
The truth that maybe no one does?
And once again I find myself waiting
And hearing only the rush of blood
In my ears
That greets
That greets my noise
How many signals do you need
Before you start to pay attention?
I reached the finish line, alone.
With no one there to celebrate,
I cheer my own success
In the silence of an empty room.
And move on onto the next fight,
Convincing myself that this next one might…
Might finally be worth it
That this next one might actually count.
And once again I find myself waiting
And hearing only the rush of blood
In my ears
That greets
That greets my noise
I do it for myself.
I do it by myself
But still I’m doing it for you
To greet my noise
I think often of David Hume’s reflection of his own efforts at publishing his ideas: “Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.” That pretty much sums up most of my creative output - but still, for some reason, I persevere…
Persevering in the face of failure makes me think of the current season of the Aston Villa women’s team. After an amazing 2022/23 season we got season tickets again for the 2023/24 campaign and are having our first experiences as new football fans of football’s heartache and disappointment. Though looking better in the last few games, it was a new feeling after such a great end to the last season to go from defeat to defeat at the start of the season. But yes, this means that 2023 has continued the love of football that was blooming at the end of 2022. A women’s world cup, Panini sticker albums, and even attendance at the women’s FA Cup final at Wembley. This has been a great year for football in our house, including a lovely trip to see family in Brighton while taking in an away game, something we hope to become an annual feature of the fixture. Indeed, after not going to Wembley since I was a child dragged by my father to see Bury fail in a play-off, or the infamous missed Southgate penalty of England’s Euro ’96 semi final, I ended up at Wembley this year twice after a multi-decade hiatus. Not only the FA Cup final but for AEW’s first UK show, All In. 2023 marks my 31st year as a wrestling fan. The longest obsession I think I’ve ever had? It is strange to think that wrestling has been such a constant in my life, but it has.
When I think of totemic rituals and traditions it is watching a particular pay-per-view or weekly episode of a wrestling show that has become the most consistent signifier of normalcy in my life across the last three decades. 2023 was only the third year since acquiring SKY Sports in 1993 that I wasn’t able to watch WrestleMania live. The happy reason, however, was that we were flying to the United States while Night 2 was happening. Having had no plans for a job, or an income, when first embarking on my 2022 sabbatical, the money that came in from the new job since January was immediately treated as a bonus and we squandered it all on a trip to Florida at Easter so we could see my aunt and uncle for the first time since they moved there years ago. It was so nice to see them after all this time apart and spend some proper time together not on Zoom! We had such a great time in Florida (unexpectedly, considering the politics of the place) that we ended up deciding to squander all the post-Easter money I earned too returning to the States for a summer road trip too. An attempt to do some of what we had planned to do back in 2020 before Covid came and shut down all our carefully laid plans. California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada - thousands of miles and tonnes of life-affirming geography that made it worth every penny even if it felt economically reckless. Consider it one of the perks of not having children - getting to have multiple holidays instead of worrying about feeding and clothing another human being with that money. It was great being back in the States for the first time in so long (and a good prompt to renew my passport when I suddenly realised it had expired the night before we were due to fly to Florida and I had to fly in on an ESTA like a non-citizen!) and, with a possible second Trump victory imminent, perhaps it will end up being a nice way to have said farewell for a while?
Politically the world just went more and more to shit in 2023. It’s like we’re not even trying any more to pretend things are OK, or that there is such a thing as truth or moral consistency. The UK government continue to openly lie about everything, piss out unelected and incompetent Prime Ministers, and throw out as many cruel and uncaring policies as they can. Across the ocean, the US descends more and more down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole most are in total denial about. The war in Ukraine continues without seeming consequence for Russia, and now Gaza has become an unending war crime (again). Meanwhile the climate appears to have changed irreversibly and like the metaphoric frog being slowly boiled alive we don’t seem to notice that the boiling summers are not going away and the extreme weather events (like the storm currently blowing down all my garden fences as I write this) might be just the tip of the melting iceberg of things to come. I remember when fascism was a thing we all knew was bad and couldn’t ever imagine returning, rather than the daily worry it has become of a very real future reality…
So yeah - it’s not all been great in 2023! Hell - we had to get a new roof because the old one fell in and, like I said, the cat almost died! But they can’t all be winners. And there’s more good stuff I haven’t mentioned yet. I’ve got to be a great part of my youngest niece’s life, fulfilling my role as ‘Gruncle’ well and visiting my sister and her family in London as much as possible this year, as well as getting to know her partner’s family a lot more too. Another thing for which I am grateful. I’ve made some nice new friends at my new place of work and have continued with my T’ai Chi and daily exercise regime (physical health - another thing to be grateful for!) I’ve seen a lot of theatre and gone to a bunch of museums. I’ve managed to stay in touch with friends all over the world and around the country. We managed to deal humanely with a small mouse invasion in the Spring and discovered some lovely local walks in our area since last Christmas when we discovered the secret woods being used by all the dog walkers in the area. And any year where you get to see Bruce Springsteen play live is a pretty great year - especially when he plays live at your football club’s home ground, Villa Park!
I guess what I’m saying, in an incredibly long-winded way, is that I have no complaints. Even when I am complaining. Because anything awful that has happened this year has happened in the context of all this other, more prominent, good and nourishing stuff. I can only be grateful to have been so well nourished, not bitter about the things that didn’t come my way on top of all that.
So on to 2024. Who knows what it will bring? I know we have a lot we want to do to the house…and there’s also that niggling feeling that maybe it might be time to move? We’ve been threatening it for years - maybe this will be the one? Then again - we’ve needed to fix stuff around the house for years too and have yet to get around to it. I’m more excited about the writing idea we have come up with together that we might get stuck into and see where it goes. The nice thing about the looming new year this December is that I feel pretty content with whatever possibilities January may bring. And as you don’t get to say that every year, again, I shall simply feel grateful that currently I don’t need 2024 to be anything more or less than whatever it will be. I’m just grateful for every day, every week, month and year, that I have where I don’t feel everything is gloom, doom and despair. Instead of thinking about more, more, more, therefore, I spend the end of 2023 just being grateful for everything I already have. Hopefully you get to do the same. Considering the possibility of a second Trump victory in 2024, or the heartbreaking chance that people here in the UK still won’t vote out the awful Conservatives when we go to the polls too in this democratic ‘superbowl’ of elections happening in 2024, it may be the last year we get to feel this way for quite some time.