Happy Same Old Year!

So, here we are, 2026.  I don't know about anyone else, but it has been a sluggish start to the year for me, with a lot of it, so far, spent in bed.  Mainly on account of the weather being cold and depressingly miserable, giving me little incentive to get up.  Apparently, the weather is forecast to get even worse next week, with the possibility of snow.  Oh joy!  That's the trouble with New Year's, though, they always feel exactly the same as the old one - the whole New Year thing is built up so much, as if it is some kind of earth-shattering event, that when it actually  arrives, it is inevitably a let down.  The clock ticks past midnight and POW!  Everything is exactly the same.  As ever, I'm making no resolutions with regard to 2026.  As I never tire of saying, New Year resolutions are a complete waste of time - if you want to change something, take a different direction, turn over a new leaf, or whatever, then you can do it anytime, you don't have to wait until New Year.  In fact, I'd say that if you are really serious about making changes in your life, you'd just do it, regardless of what the date might be.  Waiting until New Year to make a declaration of intent is a sure sign that you aren't actually serious about doing anything - otherwise you'd have done it already.  While I didn't make any resolutions, I did, however, toast the outgoing year with the words 'Go fuck yourself, 2025', because, by any standard, it was a pretty shitty year, from that fat senile fascist being back in the White House to my own personal travails, with Spurs winning the Europa League as virtually the only bright spot, (even though this was followed by them sacking Big Ange).

Still, the year has ended on a better note for me, (despite my spirits being dampened by various personal issues I won't go into), with the discovery of those Haitian and Ghanaian (not to mention Guyanese) TV channels via a Roku app, which stream apparently pirated movies and TV shows.  Over the seasonal season, most of them have been showing these films back-to-back, allowing me to catch up with quite a few relatively recent releases.  Best of all, most of them seem to grasp the fact that the season doesn't abruptly end with New Year, but is actually a twelve day festival, ending on, surprise, surprise, Twelfth Night.  To be fair, amongst the terrestrial channels, this year it only seems to be BBC1 which has been determined to bundle Christmas out of the door with unseemly haste and restore its regular programming.  The others have continued with some semblance of special seasonal schedules and branding until, it seems, the end of the weekend.  Perhaps all my moaning about the truncating of the Christmas period which seems to have become fashionable has paid off.  It's bad enough this myth that you have to take the decorations down by Twelfth night having become so widespread, (according to tradition, they can stay up until Candlemas, February 2, which is when Epiphany ends), without the powers that be trying to steal several days of celebration from us.  At least, so far, I haven't seen the usual moaning in the Daily Hate about bloody plebs still being on their Christmas holidays, even though it's January!  Bloody outrageous - if the workers don't get their noses back to the grindstone, how will the rich bastards who own everything be able to get off on their January ski-ing holidays?