JANUARY 2025
First of all, Happy New Year! If you spend any time on social media, you’ll already know that 2025 is a “perfect square year” and the only one you’ll ever see (the last was 1936 and the next will be 2116). In other words, 2025 is equal to 45 x 45, as well as being the square of the sum of the first 9 natural numbers: (0 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9)². It’s also the sum of the cubes of the first 9 natural numbers, since (0³ + 1³ + 2³ + 3³ + 4³ + 5³ + 6³ + 7³ + 8³ + 9³) is also equal to 2025. That said, as we’re poised to eat our twelve grapes with the chimes of the clock at midnight on the thirty-first of December 2025, I doubt we’ll be thinking: “That was one hell of a perfect square year!”
Anyway, my wife, kids and I have kicked it off with my brothers and their families in Sheffield (just before the snow!), successfully refuting the thesis proposed by the joke: “Are you looking forward to Christmas, or are you going to spend it with the family?” From a personal point of view, I also made a conscious decision not to try to do too much during the holiday period.
I’ve never actually been on a “time management” course, but I’ve spent a lot of years juggling a fair number of diverse tasks and activities, and I’ve come to a simple conclusion: there isn’t enough time to do everything you want to do, no matter how early you get up and how late you go to bed. And there is no magic trick to make the problem go away. You simply have to prioritise. And that means selecting things you are not going to do when you wanted to do them. It’s kind of liberating, though there is always a danger that you’ll later regret your choices.
This year I prioritised finishing work on the next novella in order to get it to someone to read for me when it was convenient for them. One of the things I didn’t make time for was Christmas cards. Unfortunately, I do regret that. The annual card is my only link with some of my oldest friends. Also, it’s no fun receiving stuff and not giving anything back. But it won’t be the end of the world if I get struck off a few lists, and I don’t think I’ll send those people cards next year just to get back in sync in 2027!
Thinking about old friends and priorities and different ideas regarding what is and what isn’t important takes me once again back to Africa and my days as a “volunteer”, although I think that everyone who has lived in a country with an “alien” culture sees things with new eyes when they return home. It’s healthy. (It happened to one of my sons after studying in LA last year!) But you have to be careful not to flaunt your “new perspective” by pompously preaching to everyone at home about how they are getting stressed out about essentially “trivial” issues. In fact, before too long you’ll probably realise that you are also forgetting what you thought you’d learned, burying yourself under your own mountain of trivia. I guess that’s why so many ex-volunteers try to keep the memories alive with their annual remember-when-we? reunions.
And I think it’s worth remembering that, even as a volunteer (never mind an overpaid expatriate), you are part of an elite, living a life of relative privilege: “special” in a way that is the absolute opposite of suffering racism. I suspect that some of the upper-class volunteers notice this less (I met people with surnames I associated with tea and tobacco companies, famous publishing houses and the like who couldn’t be “normal” even if they renounced their part of the family fortune), in the same way that buffoons like British ex-prime minister Boris Johnson, groomed to rule, appear to be unaware when they are hopelessly out of their depth. But working in the “developing world” was probably a power kick for all of us, whether we admitted it at the time or not.
Going back to the seasonal celebrations, in Sheffield we also met an old friend of the family who offered a radically contrasting approach to life the universe and everything, as you might expect that a priest would. His Christmas sermon had been about people he described as “angels on the inside” (which is why we can’t see their wings and haloes). I couldn’t help wondering what kind of place the world would be in 2025 if everyone at least tried to behave like an angel (even if they don’t believe in them!). And at almost the same time – as if I had either been inspired by the sermon or had been starting to daydream as I so often did in church as a boy – I made a mental note to begin the last novel in the Backdoor Angels series with the words: Angels they were not!
Which brings us at last to book news! So, I’m currently bracing myself for the feedback, now imminent, on A Martian Ending and am still aiming to publish in early February, while the novella Death En Route to Neptune is on schedule for publishing – as the new freebie! – at the start of April, with more stuff during the year and the final novel in the series hitting Amazon in December. I don’t think it would be such a bad way to end a “perfect square year”.