I’d like some credit here for speed: I think there’s a decent chance that this is the first conversation you’ve had about 2023. Except it is more about 2022 and how, for me, that feels like it’s already over.

This is partly because I’m writing an episode of my little 58keys YouTube series that can only run in Christmas week, but also I’m doing a thing in December. It’s called a holiday and I’m sure you’ve read about these too, but for such a long time now, I’ve spoiled the first couple of days of a break, even or especially if that break is just a couple of days. I’ll have been working up to the last conceivable second, quite often beyond that, too, and the moment I’m clear of all the work, I get sick.

You know about this, too, though I hope not from experience. The adrenaline is spent, the momentum is gone, you’re clutching your stomach and examining porcelain close up, knowing you’re going to have to clean that next and that lasagne is not always the great idea it seemed.

So the plan is to not do that.

This seems like a plan.

But it entails scheduling the work better and, frankly, dropping a lot of it. I’ve got a little while yet but two weeks before this break, I will stop getting up at 05:00. I won’t take on any evening work that I haven’t already committed to. I will take time off in order to then take some time off.

Which could be okay, except for this. It means the year is over.

That’s a huge exaggeration, obviously, but it’s not very long until this Great Two Week Pause before the holiday, then there’s the couple of days away, and when I’m back it will be full-on late December. I am not going to get any new projects off the ground before the end of 2022.

It’s just hard to see another year go when I haven’t achieved anything. I did double the subscribers to that YouTube channel, and actually I write it each week so I have just been paid for something like 45 scripts this year. I did run a newsroom for a spell, did get to judge on a couple of awards, have become Deputy Chair of the Writers’ Guild once more, have read exactly ten times more scripts than I’ve written. And yesterday I unblocked a sink. So, you know, there’s that. I also saw The Pensioners from Fame in concert.

But I cannot seem to shake how this was the year I should have had a BBC Radio 4 play on. That one small thing, just 45 minutes, would have defined 2022 for me and instead the fact that legal problems destroyed it, that appears to have defined 2022 for me.

I have met a lot of people this year, surprisingly often through that 58keys series, and I cherish that. But I’ll be glad to step over into 2023 and do that year properly.

But first I’ll spend a ridiculous amount of time thinking about how the word “year” is so close to “yearn”.