Happy New Year, folks. I’ve got a new piece in the Times Literary Supplement. The essay paid off my mortgage and will keep Hexagon free for at least another year, but don’t let that stop you from tossing a coin or two at my fat, ugly head.

All things are double, one against another. – Ecclesiasticus 42:24

Will we ever again hang on someone’s every word? I doubt it. When was the last time you read even a short sequence of prose or poetry that actually held you, moved you, changed you? Certainly not these. “God perpetually geometrises,” said Plato. Pah. Neither Plato nor whatever divine figment he had stuck in his craw read anything even remotely hexagonal, that’s for damn sure. So let’s keep this short and to the point(s). To avoid adding yet more ear-clamour to the end-of-year pile of splaining complaints about how trying these last 12 months have been, let me be the first to say, sorry, it’s only going to get worse, and for no good reason. Never mind what the economists say, and call it what you will – vibecession, hellworld, lumpland, plungepoo, Scheißblödsinnswelt - just be thankful you’re still breathing, and leave it at that.

Voltaire once reported how, in some country or other, “a giant exists as big as a mountain, and men presently fall to hot disputing concerning the precise length of his nose, the breadth of his thumb, and other particulars, and anathematise each other for heterodoxy of belief concerning them. In the midst of all, if some bold sceptic ventures to hint a doubt as to the existence of this giant, all are ready to join against him and tear him to pieces.” Woe to the giants, I say, and to those who doubt their existence, and even more to those who don’t.

The super-rich, we are told, have finally arrived at the realisation that Nature is not a fixed backdrop. Endless growth on this finite blob is impossible; there just isn’t enough room for an Us and a Them; something has to give, and someone has to go. Hence the disinformation fog. Best to keep heads under it, and expectations low. We (those still reading (and writing this)) have the attention spans of spaniels. Distracted by distraction from distraction: Frank O’Hara said this almost 60 years ago, not long before he was run over by a dune buggy. The fact that he was a museum curator and a poet and openly gay is beside the point. Because what is the point? Everyone’s everything everywhere is always elsewhere. We barely see each other. We barely hear ourselves think. We barely even smell.

Watch our chests. Do they rise, do they fall? I am writing this sloughed-off expectory sentence and those sprauchling before and after it stretched out flat on my sofa in Paris étouffé par la morve and thinking feverishly about squilla mantis vs langoustines, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Great Fire and Plague of London, Freud’s idea of how psychic phenomena, like dreams and symptoms, arise from multiple causes, and the crushed-up cochineal insects used to colour French sweets and meats, especially sausages, which we are having tonight with lentils as this coinish combination is said (in Northern Italy, we’re told) to afford good fortune, while all the while half-listening through this boil of thick, persistent sputum and artificially intelligent slop to a France Culture radio programme about why some people (“les gens frileux”) feel the cold more intensely than others. Warmer indoor environments: this tops the list, which stands to reason; modern heating has thinned and stiffened our ves...