Twenty twenty six! My resolution this year is ‘Have More Fun’. I don’t really know what I mean by that; I left it ambiguous and open-ended on purpose. Maybe a resolution more closely fitted to my current state of mind would be ‘Be Less Serious’, but I suppose it’s better (and more enjoyable) to encourage healthy behaviours rather than discourage bad ones.

Shit – that sounded awfully serious. Quick! Say something silly. Whoopee!

I got a job, by the way. After the redundancy in October I shot out around 60 bespoke CVs and lord-knows how many LinkedIn quick-fires. I interviewed with a few places but always just missed out – in one final interview I played it too safe with my pitch (they wanted crazy, I gave them pensive), in another I didn’t portray my enthusiasm effectively enough (although I would argue – how excited can one reasonably be expected to be about writing for an online pharmacy?).

Each time I received a rejection, I stumbled sadly down the hall to knock on Sarah Rose’s door, then collapse on her bed in a splash of anguish and indignance. And Sarah Rose (sitting neatly at her desk, screen of black and green Matrix code behind her, half-turned to face me on the large bouncy yoga ball she uses for a chair) would listen to me rant, and she would say nice things and tell me that the fact I hadn’t found a job so far was because my real job – the one I was meant to get – was still out there, waiting.

Now, I’m generally a pretty devout platitude-swerver these days, but this kind of thinking does act as a sort of balm when you’re in the windless, sunbeaten doldrums of joblessness. You’ve got to believe in something, otherwise things get pretty nasty pretty fast. I began questioning myself on the lowest days, gazing around me at the people who had secured paid employment, in awe and envy of how clever and talented they must have been to have succeeded where I had so far failed – how specialised, how virile, how valuable to society. And I, who had once been so proud of myself as a writer, began to feel I’d been made irrelevant: the world had automated my passion, my one skill, the craft I had spent my life honing. My value had dropped – from world-hopping writer who could crash-land anywhere and find a job in a matter of days… to jobless ghost who could not find paid work even in his homeland. That, my friend, is a real stomach-twister, a keep-you-up-at-nighter, a stare-into-the-bathroom-mirror-with-red-eyeser. It’s a real fuck.

And then.

I got a new response to an application – a smiley recruiter on the end of a phone who thought I’d be just the ticket. A day later I had my first interview. Three days after, a second. Two more days, final interview. And the next day – hired. It was insanely fast. After a period of such intense pressure, the relief was so great that it was all I could do to fight the quake from my voice down the phone.

My family, when I met them over Christmas, noted that I seemed strangely quiet, given that I’d finally received such good and hard-fought news. They thought I was sad. But I wasn’t sad; it was a sort of reverse shell-shock – when the dominos of your life have been tumbling for so long and they stop suddenly, you can’t help but watch them and wince, waiting for the first sign of a wobble. A sigh and a couple of tears and a grateful nap is about all the celebration you can manage; hollering with joy feels like jinxing it. It’s okay – I’ll holler later.

So – the job. I’m going to be copywriting for an adventure travel company, with some video editing and design mixed in. It feels good; the team seemed happy and relaxed and spoke like they genuinely liked one another, the office is filled with Indiana Jones-esque artefacts from the team’s adventures in far-flung places, and everyone looks to be around my age. Good benefits, too – once a year they actually send you out to report back on new trips: helicopters and sled dogs and glaciers and jungle. I feel a little nervous to be starting a new job – but then, I don’t think I’ve ever not been nervous. And I’m qualified. I can do this – one hundred percent.

Now I’m looking for a new place to live. Our lease ends on the 17th of Jan, and my housemates and I are going our separate ways: Sarah Rose away for a stint in Australia, Sam and Laura travelling around Europe, Mike in a single apartment, and me going back into shared accommodation. I must say, at 32, I’m not wildly excited at the thought of living with strangers. The house I’ve lived in the past two years is a palace; we only managed to cop it because five of us clubbed together for a four-bed (one couple), and I’m not technically named on the lease, meaning I’ve spent two years as a sort of secret lodger. Basically, this time around I’ll need to do things the normal way: find a sublet, sleep on a pre-owned mattress, hope the flatmates are tidy and nice and not fucking mental.

I went to a flat viewing in Dalston yesterday. I’ve never been to Dalston but I read it’s a cool place: creative, hipster, edgy. I thought maybe a stint living there would scratch the Berlin itch; I like to be surrounded by people in Docs and leather jackets. Puts me at ease. Even more so if there’s writing on the walls and the sofas spill their stuffing.

I found an ad online for a spare room near Dalston Kingsland on the Mildmay line; a 40-minute overground commute to my new job which would give me quite a pleasant chunk of reading time per day. I explored the area ahead of the viewing and found several steamy-windowed cafes which, when I cupped my hands on the glass and peered in, I found filled with boho-creatives in tiny beanies and big billowing coats like Jean Reno. Yes!

London’s weird, however: no district is ever just one thing. There’s all these overlapping layers. I found, not 200 metres away, an eerily quiet market (it was a Sunday, in fairness), where heads turned to watch me as I sauntered by, and at the end of the street a huddle of dusty men sat boozing and yowling beside a shop that looked like it had been recently firebombed. Turning a corner, I stepped over a frankly enormous human turd, and felt my enthusiasm for the area begin to diminish.

It’s just one turd, I told myself, fighting back against the wobble. That could happen anywhere.

Alright, it’d be unusual in Wetherby – but the alleys of every big city in the world are surely rife with human poo. Granted, this turd was in the middle of the pavement on a leafy suburb – but still! Keep an open mind, Dan.

The house I was heading to view was quirky; from the photos, I’d judged it to be the house of an artist, or a collection of artists. Every wall in every room and corridor was painted and textured differently – great rainbows and stripes and neon flying pigs and thousand-eyeballed angels and Mexican sugar skeletons. A strange place to call home. My finger had hovered over the ‘send’ button for a while the evening before. In the end I’d thought sod it – maybe it would be amazing. Maybe this was the beginning of something dangerous – sexy – maybe I’d bleach my hair and darken my beard and pierce both ears and start wearing platforms with a fur coat. Was that ‘me’? Not really – but I liked the idea of having the option.

The house, when I found it, was obviously the house, even from 200 metres away: in a street of otherwise quite normal abodes, only one was decorated with rainbow-coloured window sills. I rang the doorbell, a bit nervous, and a middle-aged man answered the door. He had a narrow silver goatee, a Warhol-esque crop of salt-and-pepper hair, and he was wearing a red-with-gold-trim blazer that made me think of Sergeant Pepper. His shirt, tie and trousers were patterned and multi-coloured, none matching, and on his feet were hiking boots.

“Dan, is it?” he said.

“Yep,” I said.

We shook hands and I stepped inside his gigantic wonky multi-coloured art house. The first surprise: the entire downstairs was a gallery. Two great big rooms, wooden-floored, with two dozen A1 paintings on the walls, mostly portraits, mostly women, invariably colourful. I noticed a neat table at one end of the room with rooms of champagne flutes standing beside several bottles.

“Wow,” I said. “Do you host exhibitions here?”

“Sometimes,” he told me. “I invite around sixty people once every month or two, when I want to debut a new collection. Nothing too wild,” he added, presumably in case I baulked. “It’s just from 7pm to around 10pm, generally. No loud music or anything like that.”

I said cool, and we went upstairs. The stairs were uneven, rickety, and the staircase was dark – big windows, but the dark shades of the unending murals sucked up the light. Names were written on the walls, amid strange posters and curio sexy pamphlets pasted up. I noted one piece in particular: a picture frame filled not with a picture, but squashed cigarette butts.

“This would be your room,” said the artist, opening the door to an enormous, sunlit, musky room, its oak floors and surfaces warped with age. “800 a month, bills included*.”

*For reference – eight hundred pounds every month for a bedroom in a sharehouse is considered a genuinely fantastic deal in London in 2026. I want to burn things.

The artist watched me wander around the room for a bit. It had a nice view of a church opposite. You couldn’t see the gigantic street-poo from here, which helped. We left the bedroom and settled in the kitchen, which had skulls everywhere and a pillow with embroidered cocks and ‘wank wank wank’ written all over it.

“Would you like a coffee?”

“Do you have any tea? I just had a coffee on the way here and I’m worried I’ll get jittery.”

The artist gave me a strange look then; I figure he was either trying to decide whether I was a caffeine-frightened fanny, or because he was trying to gauge just how jittery I might get. I, for my part, was mildly concerned that I might get roofied and shagged, but I decided that if I did get spiked, I could probably clobber him over the head with an ashtray before I lost consciousness.

We settled into our seats at the dining table, smiling at each other.

“This is a cool place,” I said. “I used to live in Berlin, so this feels familiar.”

The artist told me he used to live in Berlin too – Mitte, then Prenzlauer Berg – and organise eccentric art parties. He showed me a video on his phone from the 90s: a red smoky rave room filled with half-naked people dressed as demons, fake blood everywhere.

“I used to live in a squat around there,” he said. “Do you know it? Kunsthalle?”

I didn’t know it but I wanted to be agreeable and find common ground so I said yes. Then I was embarrassed because I couldn’t add any details, because I was lying. So I just said:

“It’s a cool place!”

We got into a lengthy conversation about squats then, and the artist referenced a lot of famed artists. I didn’t know who any of them were, and felt very ashamed and pedestrian. He asked me what I did and I told him I was a writer and working on several books. He did not ask what the books were about (artists never do).

I needed a wee after the camomile and excused myself to totter up two flights of orange stairs and shove open the stiff door of a tiny bathroom at the house’s highest level, like the windswept tower of a wizard. The bath, I noted, had a shower head but no shower curtain. On the way back downstairs, I passed a large wall decorated with magazine clippings depicting raw meat, and a wardrobe covered in pictures of a dried-up Egyptian mummy.

The artist and I spoke a little longer – me about how I wanted to live a more artistic kind of life, he about how his girlfriend makes music dressed as a Geisha and is insane and owns 11 cats and how they keep breaking up and getting back together because of arguments about the 11 cats.

I put my foot in it as I stood up to leave (a whole two hours after arriving).

“By the way, why did you leave Berlin?” asked the artist.

“I had this friend, Vic. She was kind of my anchor, like my barometer for normalcy. Like when things got too weird, she always kept me tethered. Then she left, and I had no anchor, and kind of got sucked into this bonkers whirlpool. It was too much for me. I couldn’t find any sense of normalcy anymore, so I left.”

The artist looked at me for two very long seconds. It was a look that said a lot. It said: have you any idea where you are, young man? It said: have you looked around you, you lunatic? It said: if you want normalcy what the HELL ARE YOU DOING IN MY MAGICAL FUNHOUSE YOU WEIRDO?!

The artist’s bewildered eyes were correct, I realised. Here I was yammering on about counter-culture whirlpools, and this was the guy you find at the centre of the whirlpool. These are the people who make the whole damn thing spin. This guy didn’t go look at art – this guy was art. And I, I realised, am most certainly not art. I love the world of it, deeply, but I much prefer venturing in and documenting the hidden world, as opposed to… you know… living in it forever. I like to explore the mad shit, get freaked out, and then go home to a nice cosy bed in a normal-coloured room.

I believe the artist had reached the same conclusion about me.

“It was great meeting you,” he said, as we reached the front door. “I enjoyed our chat.”

Great meeting you – the clearest indicator that somebody does not intend on meeting you again.

“Me too,” I said. “Really interesting.”

We shook hands and I left into the freezing January evening, sun dipping low in the sky, gigantic turd freezing over on the pavement. Ah well. Onto the next one.