Everything links back to the Roman empire. No, it doesn’t, really. And I am also sick and tired of pretending that it does. Buzzfeed might be gone, but the necessity of linking some profound geopolitical insight with whatever thing is popular nowadays with the almighty algorithm remains.

The brat dubai gen z labubu influencer thing. Whatever that might be.

I am, again, sick and tired (thank you, Anastacia) of my little broken brain constantly interpolating the deep and transcendental with the absurd and the mundane. Me, myself and I having a fight with each other because we cannot help being infected by the need of having an opinion.

I have been suffering blocks. Blocks of halloumi (actually, several blocks of halloumi that I have seen, IRL, being cut in wide chunks, marinated, and roasted), the old East Bloc that’s called The Bunker now (that’s a gay cruising bar) and the writer’s block.

In this 2026, I have already been eating fruit, and I limited myself to one takeaway per month. As a service industry worker, I am obviously traumatised by serving customers, and therefore, I have fallen into the spiral of grabbing a cheeky takeaway every now and then to balance it out. And by every now and then I mean every damn time I feel like it.

Damn.

Is ‘damn’ a word that’s widely used in British English? I promised that I would write the word ‘fuck’ less. I think I will use damn instead of fuck, to try to avoid using fuck too much, even though it sounds so painfully American.

I also think that I need to use ‘So’ less. Particularly after every period. I just love being condescending to the reader, I guess. ‘So’ sounds much more piercing than ‘therefore’, almost patronising without being pedantic.

ONE TAKEAWAY PER MONTH.

A rule that obviously has already been not only broken but pulverized entirely. The gods of takeaway are very angry with me and I owe them a half dozen of months overdue anyway.

Why do people say half dozen when SIX is literally sitting there with three letters, one of them being ‘X’. X like in X Factor, X Men or Allie X, of course.

I have also pledged to only having one coffee per day, and depending on the day I am having, the coffee being decaffeinated. I have had multiple caffeinated coffees, on the same day, one after another. A coffee parade that helped me while my boss was on holidays. The illusion of being focused and giving it all while caffeinated suddenly fades away when one makes mistakes. Oh, the revelation that caffeine does not make you superhuman, it only makes you feel that you are going faster while making the same mistakes.

Every time I think I have my life together, something happens to remind me that HEY, YOU CAN DEFINITELY TRY A LITTLE BIT HARDER.

I need to try harder to be less messy with my credit card spending, due to the fact that I do seriously think that I belong in a different tax bracket. I also did write on a paper with black marker ‘try to choose kindness’, but in 2026 I have already had various verbal altercations. Both of them while I was cycling and because I was on my bike.

I like being hyperbolic, and some or many of the things I write are embellished, but also, many times, things that I live and experience in the flesh must be undermined. Life imitates art, and vice versa.

When I cycle, I like respecting the traffic lights. Call me crazy, call me just a person with common sense who understands that being on the road means running with traffic and being a bystander means walking into traffic. Damn the prepositions in English and damn the inability of the English-speaking folk to infer that we put things in boxes and serve things on plates. I could never serve something in a plate, and even if I could definitely most likely be able to put something on a box, I have no interest in using boxes to build a sad end of the world totem.

I yell a lot on my bike. I am wearing headphones most of the time (horrible liability), listening to Culture Beat or La Bouche, and I have taken this very unhealthy habit of sometimes shouting to the lovely people of London, principally the corporate drones of the city, mainly when they are doing something naughty.

I like bellowing nasty chants to white collar assholes when they walk through the red lights. Fun fact: the chanting often happens in Spanish.

One time, late at night, before Christmas, I did say something loudly to a lady. Afterwards, said lady came towards me, causing a physical confrontation. This might or might not have happened.

After Christmas, another lady told me off. I was repositioning myself closer to the zebra crossing, the red light shining on my face as if I was Lorde in 2017, and the lady with ugly glasses and a puffy scarlet face told me something along the lines of ‘Can’t you see that it is red?’. She didn’t know that, indeed, I needed to wait for the green light, I wanted it. I was ready to fight back.

Me, in the other corner, with 89 kg, a Basque homosexual listening to Miss America by Pale Waves, looking at the female gammon, whilst she shrieks some combination of very funny British insults ending in cunt that I cannot hear. I gather the air. I think the words. They come out, beating the air between me and the woman, a shockwave of truth.

I WAS NOT GOING TO CROSS BITCH; I WAS ONLY GETTING CLOSER!!!

She acted surprised and stuttered a step back. I sighed in relief, with a grimace of victory and violence. They rarely ever expect retaliation when they confront someone. The rules of being correct become divine edicts when they are never contested. The rules of this society, the flimsy laws we submit to, disappear sometimes when we choose to create havoc.

In those moments, one realises that the rules are made up, and the only important thing is to survive, to yell louder, to run faster, to hit better and to stomp stronger.

Here’s another thing that’s made up.

The earliest Roman calendar had only ten months, running from March to December. With different names, of course. Winter wasn’t counted at all. Romans thought: ‘look, it is just a dead gap of roughly sixty days where nothing official happens. Just doom and gloom and hunger and deaths and some barbarian incursions. Let’s gloss over it and move on.’

January and February were tacked on later by Rome’s second king, Numa Pompilius, to create a proper twelve-month year. Which is why September through December literally mean “seventh” through “tenth” despite being the ninth through twelfth months. Those names only made sense when March was the beginning.

January is a retrofit. An afterthought. And yet here we are, treating it like some cosmic reset button. The green juices are flowing, the gym memberships are flourishing, and we have gobbled all the lists of what’s IN and what’s OUT.

Blue Monday has always been out. Mondays are hard enough without being blue. Apparently, the saddest day of the year, though it’s been thoroughly debunked. Doesn’t matter. Like most things that get debunked, it’s already embedded in pop culture, which means it’s real enough for marketing purposes, even though it is made up.

At my workplace (I work in hospitality, I am traumatised by this, this has been established), we will put out brownies and Victoria sponge. We will bake an entire tray, and we will cut it into tiny pieces. We care about mental health enough to acknowledge Blue Monday, but we’re still operating within a capitalist system that punishes actual human kindness. So: small pieces. A gesture. Some posters. Lovely. Done.

After years and years of psychological research, it turns out the answer is cake.

January is made up. A mask we wear while our good intentions fizzle out somewhere around the second week.

But here’s the thing about beginnings: is there ever actually a right time to start?

One time I reluctantly received advice from a lawyer. This was when I was finishing my BA in Creative Writing just as Large Language Models were going mainstream. I was complaining about how I’d chosen the wrong moment to get a degree (one might say I chose the wrong degree entirely), and she told me: There is never a right moment to do anything.

WISDOM.

Dua Lipa once said something about radical optimism (because she was promoting an album with the same name, not because she is a philosopher), about finding grace in chaos and confidently navigating life’s challenges with joy, agency, and acceptance.

We have a lot to learn from Dua Lipa. We made fun of her for not knowing how to dance, and instead of complaining or getting defensive, she went and took dance lessons. She also released a mid-album with three good songs, and instead of crumbling, she’s been touring the world, dancing better than ever and singing in more languages than Rosalia in Lux.

She didn’t wait for the perfect moment. She didn’t wait for January or Blue Monday or just any other Monday. Those are made up. She just… did the thing. But a (blue) Monday may be as good as any other day to start again. Just because it is made up does not mean that it is less good for me to use it to start again. Does it? No, it does not.

Let’s not get lost in the mysticism of the rhetorical figure.

Let’s just write more about music.

About movies.

About becoming a writer.