Happy 2025, Here's Something Mad That Happened.

A New Year's story about a cursed patio and the perils of poorly-chosen metaphor.

Right. As years go, that wasn’t my favourite. Gloomscrolling through my various feeds, it seems like the end of 2024 was a grim time all around. Norovirus, coronavirus, estrangement, grief, hardship. Bad news and broken hearts. But at least we’re being honest.

There’s something satisfying about watching my cohort finally excuse themselves from the obligation to smack on a mad smile, list our accomplishments, be grateful and humble and blessed and promise that next year we’ll be fitter and happier and more productive.

Personally, I spent most of 2024 taking a brave stand against the neoliberal concept of having your shit together. When I wasn’t working I was curled into myself like a comma in the middle of a suspended sentence. It turns out that you can’t just clever your way out of years of complex and compounding trauma by working harder. Especially not when you keep getting walloped by a roster of upsetting life events like you’ve forgotten some sort of safeword.

I definitely don’t want to get into details right now. So instead, I’m going to tell you what happened to my patio.

---

It started two years ago, at the sweaty height of a London hellsummer. Forty degrees in the shade, pitiless sun pouring down until it finally got dark enough to go outside. I stood on the back patio of the small house on the edge of the Andover Estate that I had spent months wrangling and saving and scrambling to move into and…exhaled.

I was so proud of that little patio. It felt like an absurdly grown-up thing to own. And I had strong patio-related feelings, too. Back in the summer of 2020, where there were riots in the streets of Los Angeles and wildfires in the hills and a terrifying pandemic separating us from all the people we loved and all the plans we made, Natti and me had rented a huge, strange apartment in Los Feliz. We’d never have been able to afford it if the world hadn’t happened to be ending, but we rambled around the place like manic minor royalty - and its glory was a giant patio. It meant we could safely stay outside all summer. It was dusty and full of broken furniture when we moved in, but I scrubbed it for hours and fixed it up with fairy lights, and it was magic.

There were hummingbirds. Grapefruits and passion fruits and Meyer lemons grew in the gardens on every side. Fat squirrels would come and gorge themselves on the relentless fruit and fall asleep. Natti insisted on pronouncing it to rhyme with ratio, and went out at noon every day to cook himself like a lizard. I wrote two pilots and half a book on that patio.

Of course, we were never going to be able to stay.

When it was time to move my life back to London, I made sure to find a place with a patio. It was postage-stamp sized. There was a building site next door that drove us all half-mad with the noise, and when the drilling stopped, the abandoned dogs in the animal shelter on the ground floor started their anguished midnight howl. But I stood out there with a spliff and a cup of tea, and I thought to myself - I distinctly remember thinking to myself - well. Whatever happens, they can't take this away from me.

I'm not saying the thought made sense. I've no clue who ‘they' were who couldn’t take 'this' away. Presumably some sort of professional patio-takers, prowling the wilds of inner London waiting to pounce on any permanent concrete outdoor features that might have been bringing someone a little peace. But look - the economy was in freefall, everyone was going bananas, all my carefully-constructed personal and professional plans were collapsing like wet cake, and I had lifted too many boxes that day for subtle analogy, even though Natti had helped to the extent of personally carrying two radiators from the station.

The point was that they, whoever they were, couldn’t possibly take away my small, worn-out, third-floor patio, and that seemed like a reasonable metaphor for the fact that things were probably, hopefully, going to be more or less okay.

So, anyway. The next morning, I popped to the shops to stock up on the things you always need when you’re settling into somewhere new.

I couldn’t have been gone more than an hour.

But when I got back, the fucking patio was fucking gone.

You might think it would be hard to just make off with a hundred and fifty knackered concrete slabs . The nice young man at the council was suitably confused when I explained that no, nothing had been stolen from the patio, the actual patio was gone. It turned out that there were structural issues in the block that could only be sorted by ripping up tiles to get to the roof below. It turns out that the council had forgotten to let me know.

It turns out that you’d be surprised how much you can lose, and how fast.

Jump-cut to twelve months ago precisely. The year was turning and there were fireworks over Finsbury park and I was out on the patio. By this point the council had finally put back the tiles, and in a burst of optimism I’d even got a lovely awning put in to keep off the weather. It had been another, even uglier year, but it was over, and I was out there with some silly-drunk friends, a couple of random stray people who and and my arms around someone I completely adored.

Maybe, in 2024, things would work out. They couldn’t take this away from me.

That night, there was a historic storm.

I woke up to this:

Yes, that’s my patio roof. No, that’s not my garden. The storm had picked up the entire steel structure and tossed it twenty feet, whereupon it did what physicists call loopadeeloop and landed upside down. And inside out. And next door.

By this stage I was deeply regretting my hastily-chosen, patio-based piece of personal symbolism, but at least nobody else got hurt. The nice Italian hairdresser next door had been having a leisurely breakfast when it happened, and was absolutely not going to let these shenanigans ruin one of his rare days off. He stood inside, sipping coffee and contemplating, radiating calm while I flapped and squeaked and a large goth friend with drill skills came round to assess the wreckage. It had been a lean, mean year and I had no money for another new patio. My friend gently explained that this was no longer a patio, it was a treacherous heap of fucked metal and furthermore a health-and-safety risk.

Clearing away the debris took a day and a half. That was how last year started.

I spent the rest of it trapped in an overextended metaphor, slowly and patiently putting the wreckage back together.

But by the end of December, I could write again. And right now, that’s enough.

It’s that you cannot hang your happiness on normative markers of adulthood any more than you can hang it on arbitrary and poorly-chosen personal analogy.

It’s 2025, and I have rebuilt the patio. But I am no longer going to hang my happiness on normative measures of adulthood. That barely works for those of us who are actually good at it, and I have proven myself unable to hang on to a half-ton concrete garden. So I’m not going to waste time pretending not to be some sort of degenerate weirdo. A patio cannot be counted on, but it’s the people on the patio that count.