Uh oh! Grim realisation as I left work in the pitch black on Thursday evening (yes, that was me you saw out the window! The only person in the city who went to an office on the 2nd January!)... is London the worst place I could have ended up at the beginning of the year?
By the time I’d made it to the front door I was crumpled into a state I imagine arrives moments before hypothermia sets in, when you must adopt the foetal position and be bundled up like the last of the grotty Christmas turkey in an emergency foil blanket. I fell into the sofa cold, sad, still a bit hungover, defeated — so yes, quite the sight.
There is something smug about being in the city between Christmas and New Year’s Eve; it’s a badge of honour for a true Londoner. It then doesn’t matter whether you are horizontal in bed in Brockley or Barbados on New Year’s Day. That all changes when the clock strikes midnight, the horses turn back to mice, the enormity of another 52 weeks gradually (at first — then all at once) emerges, and the blood-curdling banshee wail of the morning alarm drop kicks you, winded, into the working year.
This non-consensual scenario is not reserved for Londoners, of course. However this week, those elsewhere in the UK are looking forward to drawing the curtains one day to find everything in view has been coddled up under a fresh snowy sheet. Here? We’ll settle for black ice and slush all washed away with so-called “freezing rain.”
The glamorous beings one relies on in town for little pick-me-ups when the strains become too much have also all cleared-off. No-one famous or chic hangs around here to tell the kids not to fling dog-poo smeared ice rocks at their siblings. Unless they’re one of the poor things that have been roped into filming a blockbuster on our outskirts, it appears everyone has now relocated to one of “The Ms”: the Maldives, Mustique, Mexico or Morocco. In their place? We get conversations with people so self-absorbed they think anyone cares about their dry January, their Veganuary, their running habits. That is not a fair trade.
Pattie Boyd, the 1960s It girl once married to Eric Clapton and George Harrison, told me in an interview last year that the start of 2022 was “the most miserable” in town that she’d booked three weeks Morocco to miss it all together for 2024. That stuck with me — and today, I couldn’t agree with her more. Well, there’s a 2026 resolution. Now to start saving...
Joe Bromley is junior fashion editor
