Assorted minor things I’m changing in 2026

If not sooner

Naoise Dolan literacy allegations confirmed

My New Year intentions of how to live better, slash be less bad, are setting in early. Here are some.

P. G. Wodehouse only in my bed

Well, living people are also allowed.

But no more laptop. I have a terrible habit of writing just before I go to sleep, then waking up and writing some more. It gives me permanent low-level anxiety from all the shoulder tension it causes and it makes me sloppier about my time during normal hours — ‘Oh, I can finish it off at 6am having just awoken from a nightmare about German bureaucracy, I will definitely do a better job under those conditions’.

P. G. Wodehouse is three things: endorphin-producing, not hugely taxing and not unputdownable on the level of plot. I would never insult the great man by calling him soporific, but he is sopor-compatible for sure.

External keyboard

Related. Recently I tried propping my laptop up on the kitchen table with some books and using the keyboard straight from my lap. (I have weirdly long limbs relative to the rest of me, so that’s where my elbows fall at 90 degrees.) I was almost annoyed at how instantly relaxed I felt. I’d been propping my arms up on that table all year, creating a stress loop similar to the one from typing in bed. We talk a lot about how negative emotions manifest in the body and get ‘stored’, when the reverse mechanism can be just as pervasive: I literally think I was making myself more anxious through infelicitous shoulder posture.

Early sunlight

Another tweak whose efficacy infuriates me. What do you mean I am simply a mammal in need of blue light? I started doing those stupid little morning walks actively wishing them harm, even more so when they had the nerve to actually work. It is with no joy and a great deal of rancour that I relay this information. Believe me, I would rather it were not so.

Only Handle It Once

I say I’ll do this every year, but I have never to date reached the level of fatigue with my own bullshit that would prompt real action. Perhaps 2026 will be the one. In any case, I very much want this to be the year that I answer each email instantly upon reading it and then never think about it again.

The block — the great block! — is that I still don’t really understand the mechanism at play here. Why do I so despise answering emails? And why am I so much worse with them than I am at texts? The likeliest explanation is simply that nobody has any real leverage to make me text back, whereas there is usually money at stake if I do not email back. I don’t like being made to do things. Hence I hate emails.

Anyway, the emails will keep coming. I have to adjust. I will answer each of them as soon as I open it and that will be that, and my immaculate inbox zero will be the stuff of legend, and I’m not going to actually fucking do this am I.

There are of course texts in email clothing, and emails in text clothing. If you text me about work, I won’t want to answer it. If you email me in a way where I can respond weeks later or literally never, I will most likely get around to that one sooner. It is hideous to be like this and I know I will never change. Unless I do. Watch this space.

Cat?

Still debating! I have wanted to get a cat forever, but I go on too many work trips. On the other hand, I have retired parents and a reliable roster of lesbian friends. The cat would not die. Probably I’m inventing practical obstacles to avoid grieving the fact that I no longer see the hardy Bulette in Berlin every day.

More French autofictionalists

There can never be too many. I’ve read Édouard Louis and Emmanuel Carrère, and I’m currently in the throes of a mission to read all 22 of Annie Ernaux’s novels chronologically. I want to read Nina Bouraoui too, in part because Francophone autofiction on the whole seems very white; there are plenty of Francophone writers of colour who draw on autobiographical elements, but it tends to get framed either as fiction or autobiography rather than as deliberately rejecting the concept of narrative ‘truth’. Given that writers of colour often face pressure to ‘represent’ their community and to act as flawless witnesses, it’s perhaps more fraught to explicitly collapse the boundary between truth and fiction. I’m interested to see how Bouraoui approaches it.

Write something substantial in Irish

Longer than a poem! Longer than an essay! What will it be? N’fheadar.

Enjoy things more

/ enjoy more things? I sometimes fall into a predictable Catholic mentality that it’s somehow wrong to, that it’s somehow taking something from someone else, when the reality is that I’m far more useful to other people when I actually recharge now and then.

This is of course a stark generalisation, but I find Catholics tend to be more distressed about not being sufficiently mortified/sacrificial, while Protestants tend to feel guiltier about not being productive. I do not care about ‘productivity’ at all as long as I haven’t run completely out of money. It does not bother me to think of myself as lazy or as wasting my talents (many and splendoured as they are, yes I know) nearly so much as it does to think that I am not suffering sufficiently. It’s shallow, it’s silly, it’s not an actual intellectual opinion I hold, but it’s undeniably a vibe. A bad one! Out with it.

There’ll be more, no doubt.

Enjoy the rest of 2026*.

(*I meant 2025. Promising start.)

N