Wrap-up
To making space for something new.
Hello, everyone! Hope you had good Christmases and are gearing up for a pleasant New Year’s Eve and Day. I have decided to try and set up a new tradition, an ‘Afternoon of Epiphanies’ ahead of my return to work next Monday. It’s about looking forwards as well as backwards. And also galette des rois and cheese and port for those who partake in such things.
I’ll let you know how it goes. And, if you’re willing to be sent on some rather odd directions, I might let you know what fic I’ve been reading this autumn/winter (living that AU Bonrad life, baybee).
With the heralding of new traditions comes the opportunity to reflect and say goodbye to old ones. I won’t be doing Critmas in 2026, which feels weird and certain to say. It’s good to go out on a mid, or a high, and still take pride in a project before obligation turns it into a resentment.
When I first started Critmas, it was as a thread on Twitter with very brief thoughts and links to New Yorker essays. But then I didn’t want those thoughts being linked to a social media platform, and turned it into a newsletter. Unlike my original newsletter, Peeled and Portioned, Critmas was always hosted on Substack rather than tinyletter (RIP tinyletter).
But now Substack is a form of social media. While I have gained so much from being online, and sometimes want to poke at and encourage the more offline among us to examine a superiority that’s sometimes inferred by proclaiming this latter state (I made friends, collaborators, housemates, secured writing commissions and freelance gigs made some money off the back of it and am still a pretty available friend and companion for my irl lot so to me it’s often been like people whose parents wouldn’t let them watch TV during the week and I still did better than them at school lol), when I left twitter, I left twitter. I didn’t get into TikTok — my phone says if I redownload the app, bad things will happen to it and honestly? valid — I didn’t allow myself to even during the height of the pandemic when I had brain and time to burn. I tried Bluesky but it didn’t stick. Basically, I’m not searching for a new place digitally.
And yet…I am competitive and there are numbers on this platform that mean I am encouraged to measure my reach, audience and engagement in ways that might be helpful if I were seeking to monetise this rather mad proposition (writing as much as the average culture Substacker would in a year but over a month: ‘insane’ as more than one friend has put it recently), but for me just makes me go: ‘huh. Well that’s a bit of a shame’ and then fret over my entitlement to other people’s reading in such a crowded space. In November, I contemplated sticking my face online on Reels and TikTok or whatever to talk about Critmas but I never got round to it. I’m not going to sit here and pretend that doing this project is a full-time job: I have one of those, with a commute, and it’s not the same thing. It is a time-consuming hobby while I’m doing it though, and the work of promoting it is a step of effort too far for me right now. This is fine! But looking back over what I’ve written over the years, there are some essays/posts/articles/whatever we’re calling them these days that I am proud enough of that I want more people to read and respond to them. Unfortunately, I hope not to have enough capacity next year to put the work in to make that happen.
Which is a nice hope to have. I may well commemorate this project with something in a more physical form, and don’t be surprised if I keep in touch either here or on Peeled and Portioned. But for now: thanks for joining me on this! I’ve very much appreciated having you here.
Some more specific thanks to all the guest contributors. Alex Krook, whose photos accompanied a few of the entries from 2022. And then the guest writers, in order of appearance: Ava Wong Davies, Fred Maynard (x2), Eve Allin, Emily Collins, Henry St Leger, Joanna Pidcock (x2), Laura Gilbert (x2), Joshua Robey, Nikhil Vyas (x2) and Maddy Costa.
And then, because my friend Felix, a man called Felix who is my friend and has a name, pointed out the other week that sometimes I say ‘friend’ on here and sometimes the friends I mention are referenced by their actual names. This was because I didn’t want it to seem braggy and self-congratulatory (oooh someone’s got friends they talk to about things, guess the friend-haver logged on with some takes!) about their proximity in my life and also a semblance of pseudo-anonymity. Also some years and thoughts some people were way more uppermost in my mind than others and the influence you all have on me is something I like to keep close to my chest. I may do what some call ‘confessional writing’ (it is no confession, for I write about the tragi-comedic not sins I’m trying to repent for) but I have to have some secrets.
Nevertheless. Here is a list, incomplete but in alphabetical order, of the majority of the people who have been the unattributed ‘friends’ I have referenced and described across the last five years. I’ve not had time to ask your permission for this. If you have an issue with it, take it up with Felix — I think those listed knows where he lives:
Abby, Aliya, Ava, Catherine, Davina, Elly, Emily, Eve, Faye, Felix, Fred, George, Jesse, Joanna, Joe, Laura, Laura (yes, there are two), Lillian, Malavika, Richard, Sophia, Xavier, Zoe.
If I return to Critmas, this will be a mortifying example of ‘showing one’s hand’ but there we are. Thank you all for letting me mine our interactions for my writing.
I saw Marty Supreme this (Sunday) afternoon at the Peckhamplex. Joyous! I love da movies. Will be seeing Phantom Thread at the cinema on New Year’s Eve too. I hope at least one of you reading this goes to the sickos Valentine’s Day screening of it at Prince Charles Cinema in Soho as I will be out of town that weekend for a friend (Lillian’s) 30th.
In previous years, people have asked if I have a ko-fi account or similar. I do (here), but the morning this lands in your inboxes, I will be doing my second run as I train for the Hackney Half Marathon, in aid of Alzheimer’s Research UK. Fundraising page here.
À bientôt!
Bonus posts from the archives…
2021:
A guest post by Joshua Rabey on Yellowfin which was on at Southwark Playhouse.
A guest post by Nikhil Vyas about Tick, Tick…BOOM! and Drive My Car, neither of which I’ve yet seen! I really have to watch Drive My Car, though. I was just annoyed at myself for missing it at the cinema.
