january 2023
Most of what I share online is a form of archiving in real time, and picking out my favourite photographs and experiences from each month is something I missed doing last year. Aiming for some more regularity of recording in 2023.
I started this year by turning 30, which I recommend to everyone. I threw a train-themed dinner and dancing party at my mum’s house, site of many raucous events over the last 1.5 decades, and felt swaddled in love, support and commitment to Having A Good Time even in grey January. I went as Mick Lynch, another symbol of change and optimism in 2023.
I was gifted a set of birthday experiences along the theme of churches, including a taster session bell-ringing at our local church. We spent a surreal Monday evening teetering on wooden boards above the bells, followed by the physical (and mental) work-out of slotting into the peals of an experienced team. The temptation to explore bell towers across the country may be enough to attend a few more practices, even if I can’t see it as a hobby for my 30s.
And I was whisked away to a deconsecrated chapel in Somerset for a weekend. Walks and delicious meals fitted around lounging in front of a wood-burning stove. Haniah braved the unheated training pool while I expended 35mm on misty hills through tall arched windows, an impressively decorated stained glass birthday cake and the perfect egg and soldiers. We formed part of the strange mixture of fine art world and landed gentry coagulating at the re-opening of the local fancy gallery, built a bond with a local taxi driver running his business through his personal iMessage, and ate a series tiny and perfect mouthfuls on assymetrical ceramics before risking it all to the tarmac on the 3 mile uphill cycle home.
I read a lot in January, and cooked a lot as well. Short stories and non-fiction and novella, pastas and curries and desserts, big photobooks and a tiny paperback inherited from my dad. I’ve seen some good and some bad art in various cities, and just the one disappointing piece of theatre - preceded however by good conversation and a setting that never disappoints. I’ve seen the fruits of some labours at work and at UCL. Every new season makes me fall in love with our tiny flat once again, and short January golden hours have bled into long candle-lit evenings courtesy of the smorgasbord of homeware that turning 30 spawns.
favourite book I treated myself to the beautiful Queer Spaces from RIBA publishing, a journey through architecture around the globe that LGBT people have made their own favourite film Tar, which felt like a movie made for me with its ambiguous spookiness, classical music focus, backdrop of NYC and Berlin all orbiting around Cate Blanchett as power lesbian favourite television The Traitors, absolutely unbeatable telly that I have recommended to everyone I’ve spoken to this year. Also Everyone Else Must Burn, because fictionalized cults never lose their appeal favourite podcast Petrified, Irish horror fiction need I say more favourite art Henry Moore’s atmospheric drawings of Welsh coal-miners at St Albans Museum