January 2012 was bleak. I’d moved to London in the dregs of December after a feverdreamish stint in New York and arrived in a snow-covered city I thought I knew. I’d never been south of Camberwell, it transpired, and that had felt far enough away at the time. Peckham, over a decade ago, was not what Peckham is now.

That January was the first and, to-date, only January I started running. It didn’t last long. I never pushed through the metallic taste in my mouth to get to the endorphins. I did it for something to do, I think, and because I didn’t have a job or many friends in the city. I’ve rarely known loneliness like it.

Resolutions I have kept are few but significant: delete Twitter (I’m back on it, but it’s never been the same and nor has my addiction to it). Sell and write a book. Take up yoga. Start a newsletter. Stop buying fast fashion.

These are a handful of successes among a sea of abandonments, upon which mindfulness apps and notebooks half-filled with the titles of books I’ve read bob about. There have been the New Year’s Eves filled with impossible vagaries (“I want to spend less money and have more fun!”) and the ones with meticulous specificities, long forgotten. But there has always been something I’ve wanted to do, or try, with the new year. This year, there’s not.

I’ve not considered January as a starting point for things for a while; September is when my birthday is, and I always get a kind of existential power-up after the summer holidays. I am more drawn to the equinoxes and solstices than I am new calendar months. Last year was one fuelled by forward planning, and this has long been the same. Depending on how you look at it, I’m either very good at living in the future or very bad at living in the present.

There’s also the fact that, personally speaking, 2023 has an undeniable bigness to it. All being well, a baby will arrive and change many things. I’ve got a new book out. M has various things happening he’s been working on for years. I can’t work out if we’ll be pushing out into the world, withdrawing from it, or caught in the liminal space between the two. It seems daft to add more to the list when “looking after a tiny new person” is at the top of it.

But beneath all of this is something deeper, I think. For the past couple of years I’ve turned to Virginia Woolf’s new year’s resolutions, which is a sentence so characteristic I am embarrassed to write it. Still, it stands up - and I’ve explained as much here - and largely boils down to “go easy”:

Here are my resolutions for the next 3 months; the next lap of the year.

To have none. Not to be tied.

To be free & kindly with myself, not goading it to parties: to sit rather privately reading in the studio.

To make a good job of The Waves.

To stop irritation by the assurance that nothing is worth irritation [referring to Nelly].

Sometimes to read, sometimes not to read.

To go out yes – but stay at home in spite of being asked.

As for clothes, to buy good ones.

Good, happily vague, inherently kindly non-resolutions. As in previous years, I am going to be borrowing these, while adding a few of my own. I want to take more physical photographs. I want to read my book in the mornings, rather than pick up my phone. I want to pause when I lose my temper. I want to keep swimming. I want to cherish what I have, and hold my favourite people close. I want to send more voice notes. I want to be more patient. I want to be better at acknowledging what I have done. I want to always eat pasta in the biggest bowl possible, and wear the things that make me feel good, rather than just comfortable. I want to be able shrug when I realise I haven’t done these things, and understand that intentions are half of the battle. That some things remain unresolved.