As 2025 lumbers to a wimpering snuff, many of us see a world that seems almost unrecognisable to the one we’ve always known. Division and hatred, thinly veiled racism, outright transphobia, and the prevalence of the ego have combined to create a cultural environment in which core principles of neighbourliness and humanity have taken a back seat. Other and better writers have written about this and to much greater effect. It’s hard not to see our lives, dominated as they are by so many distractions, and consumed mostly by looking at a screen or a mobile phone, as being the primary reason for this. But I’m not a psychologist. Nor an analyst. I just believe that it’s so much easier to tell a lie than it is to disprove it. And quicker, too. Do I despair of the world? All I can say is that people get bored very quickly. They want instant gratification, and now. The shock of the new.
As for me, 2025 has been, well, unnecessarily interesting. I’d had a good life for the last fifteen years, writing and performing poems while working in my job, in retail management at the same branch of a charity for almost thirty years. 2024 was marked by the drug dealers who lived in the flat above my shop. There were frequent fights, arguments, knives, needles, gangs of ne’erdowells to contend with, all happening right above the shop. I thought it couldn’t get any worse, and then, all of a sudden, it did. In February of this year, the drug dealers upset someone, (an ex-girlfriend, apparently), who then announced on social media that she was going to burn down their flat that very evening. (Incidentally, this was Valentine’s Day. How symbolic). So the drug dealers did the right and humane thing, and moved out for the night taking their possessions with them. I watched them go through the security peephole in our back door. They loaded their possessions into a car. I hope they don’t burn the place down, to cover their tracks, I thought. So it was no surprise when I got a phone call first thing the next morning to say that the shop had burned down.
Yes, it was arson. But now I found myself in a tentative position. Would I still have a job, especially in the current financial climate? What would happen to my staff, would they still have a job? The company could very well have ‘let us go’ then and there, but they were understanding. I was made into a floating manager. My job was now to travel through the south west and cover at any branch where a manager was absent. Over the course of 2025, I worked in almost every town you can think of between Bournemouth and Cornwall. Some of them I thought they’d just made up. (Midsomer pNorton?!). I spent a lot of 2025 living in hotel rooms and eating buffet breakfasts. So yes, I still had a job.
But it was my performing which suffered. I could not commit to gigs because I never knew where I was going to be staying or working. I could not rehearse, because I used to use the shop to rehearse every single morning while I was getting the place ready. I couldn’t learn lines, especially in a hotel room. I had a few wonderful gigs which I had to book time off for, including Penzance, and a quick trip to Edinburgh. I had a good enough time.
The one thing I did, though, was to work on a novel. I’d already written the first draft when I applied to Curtis Brown Creative, and amazingly, I was let on the course. Over the summer we developed the novel, and it’s looking very good indeed. I am now tinkering with it and hoping that an agent or a publisher sees enough in it to accept it. I’m very happy with it, indeed.
This last month, I was made temporary manager of the shop in Torquay. This is much closer to home, and all of a sudden, I have time now to rehearse again. It feels like things have turned a corner. They’re even due to begin building work on my old shop, (the landlord died over the summer and nobody owned the place, thereby everything came to a shuddering halt). Which is to say, I’m starting to feel like my old self again. The whimsy is returning.
So what did I get out of 2025? A lot of memories meeting people all over the south west, and a novel, and the benefit of the tutelage of Suzannah Dunn, (who really liked my novel), and a huge amount of time sat on trains. (Working in TIverton for three months meant five hours on trains and buses a day). And time to look at my fellow passengers, all watching TikTok.
The world will not change and I cannot make it. I just know that there are civil people out there, concerned for humans and humanity, opposed to stupid wars and political bullying, opposed to toxicity, big business, politics in general. Sometimes it is better to whisper than it is to shout, but I only say this because I’ve never felt entitled to shout, and that there are others who are much better at it than me.
Robert Garnham 