2016 in review

Published Categorised as Life in General 1 Comment on 2016 in review

I spent a low-stress and low-key Christ­mas with my friend Vicky up in Manchester, and have returned to Kent over the New Year to see homet­own friends. I’ll be in the UK for a few more weeks (includ­ing my birth­day), then head­ing off to Austria for 5 weeks for work, then a further 2 weeks in Japan, mean­ing I’ll be abroad until April. A vari­ety of factors has meant that I’ve not worked full-time in months, and to be honest I’m itch­ing to go back to work and being busy all the time.

It’s fair (and easy) to say that 2016 was not a good year for me. And the consensus is that it was also a terrible year polit­ic­ally, that has seen fascism and far-right polit­ics on the ascend­ant. Here is a brief list of my posit­ives and negat­ives for the year.

I don’t have any specif­ic resol­u­tions for next year, apart from to have fun, because 2016 has been a real drag.

Posit­ives

  • I won a free trip to Japan for 2017. This isn’t a thing that happens much. I wrote about it here.
  • Enforced down-time meant I read quite a lot of books. I will write about them in anoth­er post.
  • I got some creat­ive projects done, despite being limited for work­space and never in one place for long.
  • I went on holi­day to Italy. It was cheap­er than extend­ing my lease in London by a week. You can see the photos here
  • I spent some time in France in the sunshine
  • I finally left London for good. I left for the usual reas­ons- there was plenty of work for me, but hous­ing is out of control and I couldn’t afford it any more, and I was working/​commuting long hours for increas­ingly lower rewards, and I just wasn’t having fun any more. Added to my friends leav­ing en-masse for the same reas­ons, and it seemed like a done deal.

Negat­ives

  • However my plans to relax over the summer house-sitting for my mum and then move some­where in Septem­ber were scuttled by the flat need­ing to have all the elec­trics and plaster ripped out and replaced, lead­ing to me house-sitting a build­ing site, and then by my dad’s increas­ing ill-health, so I’ve spent the last few months shut­tling back and forth and deal­ing with family … stuff. The South­ern Trains indus­tri­al rela­tions fiasco also meant that I was stran­ded at times, found it diffi­cult to take local temp work, and rarely went to Brighton despite being 40 mins away, adding to the sense of isol­a­tion while I was house-sitting.
  • I still don’t live anywhere. All my things are in plastic boxes at my mum’s until my return in April, along with a large Riso­graph machine that belongs in a studio.
  • One of my mum’s cats died of cancer. He was my little pal, and wouldn’t let anyone else pick him up. RIP Oscar.
  • I had my own health issues, includ­ing multiple bouts of shingles last Christ­mas, and wisdom tooth trouble
  • The gener­ally scary polit­ic­al climate
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One comment

  1. I’m glad that you have some great things lined up for the start of 2017, because you deserve it after the suck-age of 2016!

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