New Years 26'

More of the same

I avoid New Year’s celebrations like the plague. For whatever reason, New Year’s routinely ended in horror when I was younger, a mix of drinking, drugging and juvenile hardman-ism, more often than not had me staggering home after the bells through some field with a broken face or bloodied knuckles. Or worse, writhing half-cut under the blue light of an ambulance or Garda car, hoping to avoid going for a spin. By 21, I’d constructed enough of a superstition around the night to say fuck that altogether, opting instead to sit in my room and ring in the New Year alone with my Xbox, something I ended up enjoying — the clock ticking over indifferently over to 00.01 without applause and the fresh head the following morning.

This year was no different, sitting in a Scottish Chinese takeaway, two wall-mounted Scrub Daddies staring at me whilst I waited on my order — Beef fried rice and curry sauce — from a middle-aged Chinese woman inside a glass-enclosed counter that would’ve been more at home in a bank than a takeaway. ‘Beef fried rice one curry sauce!’ — I take the plastic bag of food from the cashier, compliment the decor, and wish her a Happy New Year on my way out the door; hers won’t be for a bit yet, but it’s nice to be nice. Then it’s back to my room to wait.

The clock inevitably ticks over to 2026 as I half-watch a Tagalog-speaking V-Tuber blow feens away in CS-GO, my fingers executing an automated salvo of ‘Happy New Year’s’ WhatsApps. The night is still, broken only by the distant shouting of hammered Scots out on the promenade or the buzz of my phone as people send back wishes. I barely made a dent in my Chinese; it was more to mark the occasion.

A couple of hundred miles south, in West Yorkshire, a woman in New Hall Prison has lost the ability to speak from hunger. The body of Heba Muraisi, who is almost 60 days into a hunger strike, is preparing itself for death. Keir Starmer, the leader of the state who imprisoned her without trial, is no doubt in the midst of some wanker soiree after his New Year’s Address.— ‘We are getting Britain back on track.’ — possibly a reference to the fact that the British government has failed to starve anyone to death since 1981. Rest in peace, Michael Devine.

Online, the newspapers rave about Russian nukes. Israel massacres the Palestinians. Britain starves those who oppose its imperialism. Washington is preparing for a military intervention against the communists in Latin America, and ‘You long for a bit more money in your pockets, a meal out, a holiday.’ It’s the 80s, 2 — this time without the affordable housing or good movies. Or maybe it was just arrogant to assume putting a 2 in front of the year made it any less barbarous than all the ones before.

The tide of screeching liberal moralism that was first unleashed by the administration of Lolita Express regular, Bill Clinton and peaked in 2021, recedes further every day. In its place, a laissez-faire authoritarianism rushes toward us — zionist, paedophilic and high as a kite — channelled like a demon through the painted husk of Lolita Express regular Donald Trump. Palantir. Anduril. Mithril. 1984 written by Tolkien. Full on, mask off, sadism and insatiable greed, without the veneer of inclusivity. At least you can call things gay and retarded again.

The promise that holstered the guns of the last century has been broken; we’re not getting a slice of the pie. Instead, there are 50 surveillance devices in my extortionately expensive flat, there’s plastic in my brain, and I can be arrested on the spot for protesting a genocide.

I remember the millennium. I was three at the time, but I remember it, being woken up and brought downstairs to listen to the countdown on the radio, eating chicken balls, the multicoloured lights of the Christmas tree twinkling away in the corner catching in the ruby glaze of sweet and sour sauce — perhaps the origin of my current ritual — as colourful fireworks burst in the sky outside our kitchen window —a warm, iridescent haze in my mind.

When I was small, I felt it was all uphill from that night. In reality, we were just heading up a bump in an otherwise downward slope.

Out my window, the porter-black water of the Clyde lies still and silent just beyond the walls of the marina carpark. On the far side, the lights of Port Glasgow and Greenock shimmer like a string of fairylights, and above them, two red beacons pulse on top of some high-rise obscured in the gloom. I scrape my food into the bin. Back to reality now tomorrow. More of the same.