“A few thrilling moments” is a line I like in “Grosse Pointe Blank” when the hero is asked to summarise his last ten years. I like it enough that I used to use it annually myself, though sometimes I would spare you the details on account of listing what I did all year is clearly a high contender for the most boring thing for anyone else to read.

I’m not sparing you the details this year.

Chiefly because 2024 is still too close and still a bit too raw for me to entirely put into words yet, so instead I am reverting to type and putting it all into numbers. When you are incapable of judging the quality of what you do, you can always fall back on how much of it you did. My feeling is that if I get to do something twice, I can’t have been all that bad at it.

So while I stress that this is really just for me and your time would be vastly better spent scrolling off to anything else, in 2024, I:

Read 608 scripts
Read 37 books
Produced 66 YouTube videos
Produced 103 podcasts
Wrote approximately 55 scripts
Wrote 1,052 articles
Wrote 52 Self Distract blog posts
Wrote 52 Two-Minute Tip posts
Was interviewed on 17 BBC radio shows
Was interviewed on 1 BBC TV show
Was the sole guest on 4 podcasts
Was visiting author at 3 schools
Ran 12 in-person workshops
Ran approximately 45 Zoom writing sprint sessions
Edited 6 magazine issues
Wrote 2 theatre programme articles
Wrote 705,438 words overall
Took 2 weekends off
And the number of long-dead book projects that came back to life was: 2

I grant you that none of this is important to anyone in any way, and that all of it is transitory, except that it’s important to me and I need to hold on to it.

Truly, time passing is forever frightening. My mom died a couple of weeks ago, but now if you ask me, I have to say that she died last year. It’s insane. We get so little time and it goes so fast and I waste so much of it, I need to imagine I’m getting at least some things done.

And you, you have so much to do yet you read to the end. You are lovely. Thanks for indulging me: sometimes it’s just cathartic to write things down.