Medium Delirium

It is the eve of Lunar New Year and the air is alive with festivity. It’s very weird, but as I get older I’ve been enjoying the (frankly ridiculous) fanfare surrounding LNY more and more. In particular, the terrible and incessant festive songs featuring an unidentifiable mesh of voices belonging to local actors and actresses in need of a quick buck that stream at a horrifyingly loud volume from every supermarket – I quite enjoy those.

My whole family (mum, dad and sister) just returned from a ski holiday in Japan. I skied for the first time in 2019 and found the whole enterprise too logistically intensive – the attire and equipment bulky and cumbersome, lots of queueing, terribly cold. I was also rather bad at it. Since then, I’ve been rejecting their annual requests to join the trip. While on a video call with my mother last week, she excitedly told me she’d found a slope that would be perfect for me, one I was sure to find manageable and fun. ‘It’s idiot-proof!’

An itchy ear woke me up a few times last night. I only stopped scratching because what glimmer of consciousness flickered through my sleep haze alerted me to the possibility that I might chip my manicure, the manicure I’d paid a festive surcharge to get done. When I told J, he said this was surely the epitome of a first world problem.

If you celebrate – happy Lunar New Year!