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How a two-year-old photo might help shape the new you | Life and style

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I am writing from the past, so many things remain uncertain for me about Christmas 2021. Will my husband’s parents have managed to adjust their tablet screen to show us something other than the ceiling, or my mother-in-law’s ear? Did we have our usual fight about my husband eating foods at a time other than that which I have arbitrarily decreed to be the correct time? (No crystal ball required for this: yes.) Where have we landed on the farce-to-fury British politics rollercoaster and how deftly has the Queen’s speech skirted it?

Specifically, I find myself wondering what’s on television: not the programmes, the adverts. Usually, the evening of the 25th marks an abrupt shift from lingering shots of whatever salted caramel prawn crown Frankenfood Heston has dreamed up this year and baffling perfume ads in which Johnny Depp stamps on a guitar in cowboy boots then uses the shards to carve his name into a buffalo or something, to soft white sandy beaches lapped by Tiffany blue seas set to calypso tunes. Traditionally this is the travel industry’s peak period, as we collectively realise there is nothing to look forward to other than endless night and scrabble to book a fortnight in Crete, our deposit a down payment on optimism.

I enjoy this moment, which habitually marks my shift from anticlimactic Yule sulk (25 December, 8am onwards) to acceptance of the sofa-bound enfattening that follows. I can usually sag comfortably into these empty days, thanks to a TV-fuelled realisation that a time will eventually come when I won’t be sitting in the dark eating crumbs from my dressing gown at 3pm. But who’s planning a foreign holiday now? I have become so feral, I can barely restrain myself from meting out violent summary justice on speakerphone callers on a short bus journey; there’s no way I could survive a Ryanair flight. What with that, and trying to work out which Tory donor is least likely to mislay your £120 PCR, I would be astonished if the beleaguered travel industry is planning an all-singing, all-dancing Cop26 defying televisual hymn to the escapist glamour of international holidays this year.

So what can we look forward to if it’s not getting out of here? I don’t imagine many of us will be tackling the seasonal slump at the Next sale: climate anxiety made even Christmas shopping a guilty, half-hearted business for me. I love writer Naomi Alderman’s suggestion of using multiple Advent calendars to incentivise yourself in the day-by-day trudge through January and February, but it’s probably too late for this year.

Instead, why not try the social media trend that had a brief moment recently: find a photograph of yourself from exactly two years ago, before, well, you know. That might sound melancholy, but I promise you, it’s not. The only picture I could locate was taken at an axe throwing venue with my family, which is the kind of thing we did back then, apparently. I’m celebrating a fluke throw that hit the tiny bullseye, after an afternoon of dangerously casting axes everywhere but the target. Thrilled at my axe achievement, I look happily carefree, brighter and better rested, plumper of cheek, less bloodshot of eye.

But apart from my axe exploits, I remember I was very exercised back then about a company’s inability to sell me the pint-sized mug I desired, genuinely upset and expending angry emailing time about this mug “issue”. Checking back through my messages, I see I was also fretting about my husband taking most of January off work and hanging around at home, my precious solo workspace. Ha. Two years later, the handle broke off my only intact pint mug last week as I carried it upstairs, spilling tea everywhere. Barely peeved, I called my husband, with whom I have been coworking and living 24/7 all this time. He came and helped me mop up, then we had a cup of coffee together, as we do most mornings. It was very nice, even with substandard mugs.

I don’t believe adversity or stress necessarily makes you stronger: if it doesn’t work for paperclips, why would it for people? But here we all are, still going: wearier than our fresh-faced 2019 selves, having faced a bucketload of loss, fear and hardship, perhaps a touch wiser. That feels quite comforting to me.

Of course, the other big advertising push this season is “new year, new you”: the promise of transformation through vegan meal deliveries, orthodontics or HIIT classes. I think this is, if anything, more doomed than travel ads – surely no one has the energy for self-improvement right now?

Instead, that picture might, I hope, give you the sense that the person you are now is OK, really, but also that the end-of-2019 person you were still exists in some form. I know that mug-obsessed, small-stuff-sweating innocent I was is still in here somewhere under the dressing gown crumbs, behind the eye bags. I bet yours is, too. So that’s what I’m looking forward to: new year, same me, plus the hope of a hint of old me.


I am writing from the past, so many things remain uncertain for me about Christmas 2021. Will my husband’s parents have managed to adjust their tablet screen to show us something other than the ceiling, or my mother-in-law’s ear? Did we have our usual fight about my husband eating foods at a time other than that which I have arbitrarily decreed to be the correct time? (No crystal ball required for this: yes.) Where have we landed on the farce-to-fury British politics rollercoaster and how deftly has the Queen’s speech skirted it?

Specifically, I find myself wondering what’s on television: not the programmes, the adverts. Usually, the evening of the 25th marks an abrupt shift from lingering shots of whatever salted caramel prawn crown Frankenfood Heston has dreamed up this year and baffling perfume ads in which Johnny Depp stamps on a guitar in cowboy boots then uses the shards to carve his name into a buffalo or something, to soft white sandy beaches lapped by Tiffany blue seas set to calypso tunes. Traditionally this is the travel industry’s peak period, as we collectively realise there is nothing to look forward to other than endless night and scrabble to book a fortnight in Crete, our deposit a down payment on optimism.

I enjoy this moment, which habitually marks my shift from anticlimactic Yule sulk (25 December, 8am onwards) to acceptance of the sofa-bound enfattening that follows. I can usually sag comfortably into these empty days, thanks to a TV-fuelled realisation that a time will eventually come when I won’t be sitting in the dark eating crumbs from my dressing gown at 3pm. But who’s planning a foreign holiday now? I have become so feral, I can barely restrain myself from meting out violent summary justice on speakerphone callers on a short bus journey; there’s no way I could survive a Ryanair flight. What with that, and trying to work out which Tory donor is least likely to mislay your £120 PCR, I would be astonished if the beleaguered travel industry is planning an all-singing, all-dancing Cop26 defying televisual hymn to the escapist glamour of international holidays this year.

So what can we look forward to if it’s not getting out of here? I don’t imagine many of us will be tackling the seasonal slump at the Next sale: climate anxiety made even Christmas shopping a guilty, half-hearted business for me. I love writer Naomi Alderman’s suggestion of using multiple Advent calendars to incentivise yourself in the day-by-day trudge through January and February, but it’s probably too late for this year.

Instead, why not try the social media trend that had a brief moment recently: find a photograph of yourself from exactly two years ago, before, well, you know. That might sound melancholy, but I promise you, it’s not. The only picture I could locate was taken at an axe throwing venue with my family, which is the kind of thing we did back then, apparently. I’m celebrating a fluke throw that hit the tiny bullseye, after an afternoon of dangerously casting axes everywhere but the target. Thrilled at my axe achievement, I look happily carefree, brighter and better rested, plumper of cheek, less bloodshot of eye.

But apart from my axe exploits, I remember I was very exercised back then about a company’s inability to sell me the pint-sized mug I desired, genuinely upset and expending angry emailing time about this mug “issue”. Checking back through my messages, I see I was also fretting about my husband taking most of January off work and hanging around at home, my precious solo workspace. Ha. Two years later, the handle broke off my only intact pint mug last week as I carried it upstairs, spilling tea everywhere. Barely peeved, I called my husband, with whom I have been coworking and living 24/7 all this time. He came and helped me mop up, then we had a cup of coffee together, as we do most mornings. It was very nice, even with substandard mugs.

I don’t believe adversity or stress necessarily makes you stronger: if it doesn’t work for paperclips, why would it for people? But here we all are, still going: wearier than our fresh-faced 2019 selves, having faced a bucketload of loss, fear and hardship, perhaps a touch wiser. That feels quite comforting to me.

Of course, the other big advertising push this season is “new year, new you”: the promise of transformation through vegan meal deliveries, orthodontics or HIIT classes. I think this is, if anything, more doomed than travel ads – surely no one has the energy for self-improvement right now?

Instead, that picture might, I hope, give you the sense that the person you are now is OK, really, but also that the end-of-2019 person you were still exists in some form. I know that mug-obsessed, small-stuff-sweating innocent I was is still in here somewhere under the dressing gown crumbs, behind the eye bags. I bet yours is, too. So that’s what I’m looking forward to: new year, same me, plus the hope of a hint of old me.

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