It's my birthday 🎈🎈🎈

on getting older, the Banshees of Inisherin, and beating the winter doldrums

Today I am 31 years old. My birthday—the twelfth day of Christmas, the Epiphany—marks the end of the holiday season for many cultures around the world, and for me personally. Extremely annoyingly, it is also now the anniversary of the fucking attempted coup.

If I could have chosen when to arrive earthside, I would have gone for spring or summer. Winter is not my season. But at least I was born two weeks late, giving me some breathing room from Christmas’s suffocating energy. And I do like that I get just a little bit of time post-New Years to feel celebratory, because after my birthday there’s just the dark abyss of winter stretching interminably ahead of us.

Never in my life has that been more true than here in northern England. I did spend the start of 2021 with Lynette at her old flat, so I have some idea what people deal with at this particular latitude at this particular time of year, but since we were under strict lockdown at the time life just seemed miserable across the board, rather than seasonally specific. We were also raising and wrangling baby Gus, which was a joyous distraction from my ever-present and winter-worsened ennui.