Goodbye 2023

My father had a stroke in February. Regular readers may recall that this was not his first stroke. He was rushed to the hospital, underwent an emergency thrombectomy, and appeared to be making gradual progress towards recovery. Shortly after, however, he contracted pneumonia in hospital, after which he appeared to suffer a further stroke. From that point, he entered a period of steady decline and passed away in July.

For this reason, 2023 has been marked for me by care: travelling to and from hospitals, sitting with my father, my sister and I discussing his condition, the treatments to first improve his condition and subsequently to make him comfortable. We visited care homes and spoke with nurses in hospices. We arranged his funeral and his wake. We scattered his ashes. We sorted out his affairs, the paperwork, the finances, the strange family fall-outs which a death seems to bring about. All of this has been one protracted act of care, ensuring our dad was listened to, that what he wanted was met, even after he was no longer present. It’s been exhausting, this care, but it has also been a means of navigating grief.

Like my dad, I have two children. I often look at them and imagine how they would respond - if, or when, they were to go through the experiences I have this year. I have a vision of the two of them, abandoned in a forest, dark and filled with distant howling terrors. I picture them holding hands, reassuring one another, and perhaps occasionally bickering, as they pick their way along an unlit and uncertain path which, after many long nights, leads them back into the land of the living. I feel proud, imagining them doing this, and like to think that that’s how my dad would feel, if he were able to see my sister and I navigating the unsure landscape of grief, bureaucracy and aftermath we found ourselves in.

They say the most stressful moments in one’s life are the loss of a relative, a wedding, a change in career and moving house. While I’m not planning to move house, not long after my father died, I got married, and this week I finished at Cartwheel Arts, a fantastic arts charity where I’ve been working for the past couple of years.

In the midst of all of this, Writing the Future was published. A companion volume to 2021’s Writing the Uncanny, this is another collection of essays on crafting fiction co-edited by myself and Dan Coxon, this time with an emphasis on aspects of speculative fiction. Described by The Guardian as ‘an important addition to any writer’s bookshelf,’ it takes in dystopia, climate catastrophe, aliens, quantum physics, and plenty more.

Usually, I write a ghost story for Christmas, something I start work on in late summer in order to have it finished by the autumn so I can then work out what to do with it by the winter, but, due to obvious circumstances, I didn't really have time this year.

So instead I put together Ghosts at the Old Library: six original ghost stories which I commissioned via my other workplace, Levenshulme Old Library. These were stories from six different authors, including two from the local area for whom I ran a series of dedicated mentoring sessions. Each of the stories has been printed as individual Christmas cards and is currently in the process of being produced as studio recordings that will be released as podcasts and broadcast on local radio during the Christmas period. Each story takes a local landmark as its setting and inspiration, although being familiar with the area isn't really necessary for enjoying the stories. I also commissioned a local artist to design the cover for each book/card and arranged a series of lantern-lit events at Levenshulme Old Library itself, where each of the stories was performed in full.

What’s that? Yes, you’re correct – this did indeed turn out to be quite a lot more work than simply writing a story!

That said, I am excited to have ‘Clown’, a new semi-ghost-ish story published in the forthcoming volume of the always excellent Lunate, a Manchester-based literary publication which is due to reach letterboxes before the end of the year for those who order asap.

As a reader, my undoubted literary highlight for this year has been Nina Beachcroft. Beachcroft was the author of a number of bestselling children's novels whose popularity was at its peak in the 1970s, and I first encountered her work when I read Cold Christmas, a slim ghost story, last Christmas.

Since then, I’ve been working my through her other equally slim books and have found there’s something curiously addictive about her fiction, an uneasy mix of toybox fantasy, authentically bitter sibling dynamics, and, above all, a compelling fairytale strangeness. Well Met by Witchlight and A Visit to Folly Castle are perhaps her most widely read books, but my personal favourite is A Spell of Sleep, in which a boy, wandering through woodland, accidentally wakes a mysterious man and woman and unwittingly appears to break an ancient spell. I became interested in writing more about Beachcroft and noticed her Wikipedia entry listed her birth year but no death year. Either her reputation had dwindled to the point where even her passing hadn’t reached the internet, or she was still alive. After some further research and a few emails, I found myself one morning having a lengthy conversation over the phone with the sprightly and entertaining 92-year-old Nina Beachcroft, who recounted her passion for writing for children, her sincere belief in ghosts, and a number of anecdotes from her days rubbing shoulders with the likes of CS Lewis and Tolkien. She was also thrilled to know that, despite all of her work being out of print, she still has readers. If you have a love for an out-of-print author, I can heartily recommend getting in touch and making their day.

As this no doubt indicates, this has necessarily been a year of comfort reading. In addition to Beachcroft’s novels, I’ve also revisited Doctor Who: The Virgin New Adventures and completed Joan Aiken’s 12-novel Wolves Chronicles. I think the book which came out this year which I loved most Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place, a family memoir disguised as a love-letter to flat landscapes which is at times painfully melancholy.

I also appeared on a panel at this year’s Cheltenham Literature Festival, talking with Alex Clarke and Ben Alderson-Day about the uncanny, myself from a literary angle and Ben from a cognitive neuroscience viewpoint. Ben’s recent book, Presence, presents a scientific analysis of the phenomena of unseen presences, a fascinating approach to something which, in literary terms, so often feels not just un- but positively anti-scientific. Somehow Ben’s mode of writing makes for a more unsettling read than a good deal of the fiction which seeks to interrogate the uncanny.

Something my dad has left behind is music. Both in the tangible sense that while clearing his flat I came across dozens of recordings of himself performing his own compositions and in the slightly more abstract sense that his love for music, both as something you experience and something you put out into the world, has been handed down to me. Perhaps this is why this year I’ve found myself appreciating music on what feels like a rather fundamental level (some recent thoughts in that direction here).

Below are some of my favorite songs of the year. They’re not in any particular order, although for me 2023’s standout piece of music has been ‘Topless Mother’ by Nadine Shah. This is quite a recent song, which always feels like a bit of a cop-out when people do their end-of-year lists, but it’s a wonderful piece of music. Not so long ago, Shah made a cryptic announcement on Twitter that she intended to end her life. Thankfully some friends intervened and kept her safe. I find ‘Topless Mother’ fascinating. It’s so full of its own weird energy and emotion, none of which I would get to experience without someone to write and perform it. It makes the hairs stand up on my neck each time I hear it and, after the year I’ve been through, has honestly left me thinking what a simple miracle being alive actually is. Quite an achievement for a three-minute pop song, I suppose. When those frightened and lonely children emerge from that forest, I hope there’s music which is even a fraction as wonderful as this waiting to greet them.

Special mention too for ‘Now and Then’ by The Beatles. The official version is of course lovely, but I’ve been haunted by an AI-assisted recreation of the song as a jangly 1964-era Beatles pop tune and is so spookily convincing it entirely overwhelms the awareness I have that it’s a fake feels and strikes me as a pure and original Beatles track and I can’t help feeling how annoyed my dad would be if he knew he’d died before he got to hear it.