Thank you for listening but it’s time for me to recalibrate and reset

Hilary Fannin’s Year: For Halloween I dress up as a 60-year-old with peroxide blonde hair, a chain-store jumper and too much eye make-up, and lie on the couch with the cat, eating fun-size Mars bars. It’s wonderful

Hilary Fannin: We expected our lives to become richer as we got older. But it’s easy to feel increasingly alone. This Christmas I’ll raise a glass to absent friends

Hilary Fannin: I overhear their contretemps when our trolleys briefly kiss in the domestic war zone otherwise known as Ikea

Only 380-ish hours left until Christmas and not a child in the house washed, as Great-Aunt Delphinia would say

I had an online chat with a robot. Suffice it to say that the bot and I had a discordant communication, neither of us quite understanding the other

Tangled memories, good intentions and a dead bird on a weirdly warm November beach walk

As I was already on the top floor of the store, with no pressing inducement to ride the escalator down again, so I’d wandered into its Christmas zone

Maybe it’s the time of year, or a relentless low-level sense of helplessness in the face of world events

Hilary Fannin: The last time I saw her she was in the hospital on the outskirts of the town we were revisiting, her faculties being smoked out by disease

My mother, sensing she was not alone in the kitchen, saw a young woman drift through the hall

Here, gangs of teenage boys in tight denim jackets and polished boots met to fight similarly attired gangs

How opportune that a pal should send me the Homekeeper’s Diary 2023, by Francis Brennan

Gywneth of Goopdom, my queen of all that life throws up, bends my mind this time with an article about ‘living funerals’

My sister has been ill. I’ve come to see her after three years of phone calls and unsatisfactory Zoom connections