Barry Keoghan! Immersive theatre! Love Island All Stars! How 2024 are you?
Already it’s possible to see how this year is shaping up, politically, economically, genocidally, but most importantly in the minutiae of social life in London.
Certain key interests, activities and behaviours will mark out Londoners who are doing things right in 2024, in contrast to those still pathetically stuck in 2023. So just how 2024 are you? Well, see how many of these you’re busy ticking off…
Two months in and The Devonshire Arms in Piccadilly is already ‘The Best Pub In London’, run by ‘The Best Landlord in London’, where you can buy ‘The Best Pint of Guinness in London’. All of which may be true, but if you really want to be part of 2024 you can’t simply have taken your turn in the orc-like throng at the bar, you need to a) have been into the ‘invitation-only’ back room, and arguably more importantly, b) have managed against all odds to have secured a table in the astonishingly flame-heavy upstairs restaurant. Only then, will you have ‘done’ the Devonshire, friends. And can look for the next place.
The old Saltburn salty bathwater guzzler is showing no signs of retreating from Instagram grids. In Masters of the Air, the new Steven Spielberg-produced, Band of Brothers-in-the-air show, Keoghan is back doing his urchin-rogue thing. Mostly though, we’ll be seeing him on red carpets and front rows in increasingly spiffy ‘baby girl’ gear, the naughtiest little pretty boy wrong-‘un-who-needs-a-good-hard-saving thirst trap in town.
Everyone has lost interest in Love Island, even ironically, but like the returning Gladiators on BBC (with which it shares a concentration on too-small clothes clinging on for dear life to painfully-inflated bodies), Love Island All Stars wraps the old shit up in a neat new package sufficient to pique the interest in us jaded screenheads. We love it: quality ironic viewing and associated ironic gossiping, gradually evolving into an ultra-serious career-damaging commitment. So who will win? ‘The one rescued from nightclub PAs’ and ‘the one with the sex toy company’? Or ‘the one with the sense of humour’ and ‘the one that’s a psycho’? Or indeed, ‘the generic-y personal trainer’ and ‘the generic-y personal trainer’? Who can possibly say?
Mezcal was cool about 15 years ago, but like the waves of nausea that occur whenever you drink it, its come back again. ‘Mezcal is not tequila’, you must say, ‘In fact, tequila is a type of mezcal’. What you mean is that you’re not allowed to have fun with this drink, you can’t knock it back in a shot round with your buddies. Instead, you have to sip it like a whisky and talk about it in relation to the other varieties you’ve tried, commenting on its smokiness and oakiness, clinging onto half-remembered knowledge as the nausea rises again and you sense the Feeld date sat glassy-eyed opposite now rapidly losing faith in you even as a potential snog, never mind a partner for the journey into techno-magick future-sex that is well within their skillset. Still, do you want to be so 2024, or not?
Oddly, and typically, for a generation obsessed with being inert receivers of images, the one place where you can receive images in a way that might be good for your brain – art galleries – are now no longer deemed worth your time. Now the exhibitions have to be immersive. Which means either you have to walk into rooms where there’s video projections on all the walls, or you have to walk into a room and touch something to get out again. Of the former, there’s the Van Gogh one and the Tom Hanks one, Lightbox, where he narrates stories of going to the moon. Of the latter, there’s Bubble Planet, which is basically a soft play without the measles. Visit one of these, grid post loads of photos for the image-slaves who have yet to get with the immersive crew, and use this caption: “play is an expression of the artist in all of us.”
The reason why everyone’s so nice and giggly at parties these days is nothing to do with conversation. Yes, getting on the mild psychedelics in oil form is now the go-to for any gathering, and indeed may be the best accompaniment to do most things that don’t involve machinery. About time. Cocaine bores have been ruling the city for several decades too many; time to stop teeth-grinding and start mouth-dribbling.
What everyone says about natural wines is that you can drink as much of it as you like and you won’t get a hangover. Let me tell you something: this is not true. Still, the word natural tends to stimulate most middle-class Londoner’s debit card-tapping reflexes, so don’t be left behind in your Blossom Hill upside-down world.
He’s coming back, isn’t he? And this time, he won’t be so reasonable. Yes, much of this year will be tied up with Presidential race stress, checking to see if Trump is mortally wounded by the litigation and charges, and no doubt watching open-mouthed at how his Presidential campaign continues to gather momentum, ploughing inexorably down to its White House target like a flying fortress on fire. Will he make it? Will the world survives what comes next? All fun things to think about.
Every wannabe writer is now running a newsletter on Substack, even though by the time you actually think such a thing is viable as a source of extra income, it has already matured past its viability stage and entered the period where it becomes flooded with every wannabe in search of extra income, making it a worthless waste of time. Still, it’s important to have a Substack before everyone gets totally bored of it, so on you go, do tell us more about your ‘struggle’.
Essentially this is dentistry without having your teeth cleaned. And given the way your muscles are slowly teased into new angles by the reformer machine you are pinioned to, after a couple of classes you may actually prefer to book in a tooth extraction instead. For those who persist, this is the perfect lunchtime class for impatient Londoners, a fast-tracking of slow-burning Pilates that allows you to get big gains while staying smug and semi-permanently wounded.
If you really want to be 2024 about it, you should have already seen The Last Dinner Party live in 2023. However, there’s still time to jump on the bandwagon as the Brits Rising Star and BBC Sound of 2024 winners tour throughout the year, spreading their extravagantly attired jollity to venues where you can nod along and mansplain to girls at the back that it’s really just Florence Welch-meets-the-Famous Five and you prefer Goat Girl.
Depends on the sock, depends on the heel, but theoretically if you get this right you could become insta-famous, properly fashion-viral in a way that makes Paul Mescal sit up and take notice, and certainly Hollywood, via the year’s biggest book deal for your tell-all memoir, ‘Why I Choose To Wear Socks and Kitten Heels That One Time’. This could change everything.
There are too many decisions to be made in this life, and certainly in decoration. Which is why many are making the wise decision to do the old ‘matchy-matchy’ and keeping the walls, curtains, skirts and ceiling, all one colour. At first glance, it looks like the work of a diseased mind, but the more you think about it, the more sensible it seems, the more humble (in a humble bragging kind of way), the more classy. Why not…yes…why not do the whole goddamn house in fuchsia?
