Some years ago now, when I fancied myself as a bit of a poet, I found myself scribbling down verse on every spare bit of paper I could find. For a while it was constant, like some kind of obsession or compulsion, but looking back it seems to have been something of a forerunner to this blog, in the sense that I was looking for opportunities to write as regularly as possible. You could also say it provided a window into my deepest adolescent thoughts and feelings in much the same way this does at 24, although those tended to be much more cringeworthy – as I realised when Mum found one poem lying around one day. Thankfully, I’ve forgotten most of them now, and the few that remain are safely tucked away in my personal notebooks. One, however, still revisits me now and again, and I was reminded of it just the other day. As you might have guessed, it was called ‘January Scales’.

Now that 2022 has begun, it obviously seemed an appropriate topic of discussion, particularly because a great many of us will not long have navigated the post-Christmas blues, and that poem was one that tended to dwell on them perhaps a little too much. In particular, it told of one man’s nerves as he anticipates the first weigh-in of the year in his bathroom, fully expecting the numbers not to fall in his favour. I think by writing it, I succumbed to the habit of always viewing a new year negatively, as something to be feared – and why should that be the case?

I don’t know what the next year, 18 months or beyond will bring, but I’m going to try my best to embrace it as an opportunity at all times. It can be scary going into the unknown, but exciting too. As I once said six years ago now, a new year is a blank canvas, and it’s one to which I fully intend to add a lot of colour, no matter how long that might take.

Mason