January Please

Well well well

All I had was a million details. I couldn’t see how it would ever be possible to make a container for the cascade of interesting stuff that poured past and through me each day
- Helen Garner

On the last day of 2025 I woke up early and wrote a December Please letter to you in the morning, then set about packing, showering, and readying for the journey from Aberdeen to London. Our grandmother Joanie’s NHS nurse made a house call and, after checking up on her patient, asked us for our advice on how to responsibly introduce her tween to alcohol on New Year’s Eve.

He doesn’t like a shandy, I’ve tried that one, any other suggestions? I drew a blank. Imbibing my first alcohol as a tween had not been a great move for me. Though of course at the time it felt like a huge, unexpected answer. A cure-all substance, lifting the burden of the sheer volume of THOUGHTS THOUGHTS THOUGHTS rushing through my brain at all hours? Oh hell yeah! (Oh, hell.)

My sister and I were flying together, just us, for the first time as adults. 8D and 8E, not bad. She lost her boarding pass and the gate agent had to manually board her. The agent’s face turned ashen and she called her manager over, confessing to checking in the wrong person — another passenger with the same last name. Don’t worry that will be me! We’re sisters! Everyone melted in gladness. Me in pride. I was traveling with my sister, you see! My sister!

After all that the boarding pass turned out to have been somewhere in my sister’s pants the whole time. We laughed maniacally when it turned up on the seat beneath her. She let me keep her lost-and-found boarding pass for my maybe-one-day scrapbook. I loved seeing our same last name on the passes. (My mother-in-law often calls me by my partner’s last name. But I will never be anything other than Hannah Lees! I will forever be as someone as Hannah Lees! It’s Hannah Lees, please!)

No sooner had we settled into our seats than the captain came over the tannoy. At a cantering clip he shared that Heathrow landing slots would be in short supply, on account of a fog-induced backlog. A one hour twenty wait here on the tarmac, folks. Please accept a bottle of water, with our compliments. I felt rationally accepting but physically hungry and antsy, trapped and roiling with excess energy. My sister offered me a Zyn. I decided to try it.

All hunger and antsiness disappeared. An enormous calm came over me and I locked in on a conversation I’d been meaning to start with her but been slightly too afraid of. I felt anchored. I felt amazing. A cure-all substance, oh hell yeah! Oh wait. Oh, hell. With my first ever Zyn in, I vowed that my new year’s resolution would be to quit Zyn.

Happy New Year, everyone! Lunar New Year incoming.

*
January Reading

The Mushroom Tapes, Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein

The Season, Helen Garner

Take What You Need, Idra Novey

Jung, Anthony Stevens

January-into-February Reading

Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

As Lucia Pietroiusti of Serpentine’s Ecologies department puts it, Hospicing Modernity, “really speaks to the sense that something is ending or collapsing; it speaks to the nested and interdependent collapses occurring at psychic, organisational, societal, and planetary levels, and to how we might live through these collapses without inflicting further violence.”

Until next month,
H x

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