2023 Wrapped…
Well, 2024 is underway and F**k me, did we start where we left off or what?
As the country tipped ever closer to capsizing into the English Channel, it was nice to pause for a while with friends and family, just long enough to feel guilty about all the food and the booze and the gifts.
Turning on the news would’ve been fatal, so we didn’t.
As for work, Wood with Words (that’s basically just me…) is fully back at it.
Regular clients are already requesting new content and I’m firing up the ideas furnace, or something.
2023, I’m a little hesitant to admit with the HMRC deadline for payment looming, was a pretty successful year for Wood with Words.
After nearly dying at the end of 2022 due to a massive f**k off heart attack, the only way was up, but it was a steep and sharp ascent that included several new clients, old clients returning, and on a personal note, buying a lovely gaff with my beautiful girlfriend.
Not bad, right?
So, what’s in store for 2024, I hear you ask… (Mum)
…quality service for my regular clients with the capacity for two or three large ‘one off’ website rewrite type jobs a month, that’s what.
It might not sound spectacular, it might not seem all that remarkable either, but I’ll tell you something, it will make all the difference for the organisations and businesses who use my writing services.
Why else would they keep me on for 3 years?
They’re not idiots…
In terms of resolutions, this is one, to update my socials and website regularly, at least once a week, if only to get at the people who say ‘blogs are dead…’
Surely they mean ‘blogs are dead good?’
So, it looks like writing more in 2024, which rhymes doesn’t it, and brings me to the poetry and spoken word.
2024 is shaping up to be like 2022, if you catch my drift, and by that, I don’t mean ending with near death. I mean poems, lots of poems, in some pretty special places.
I can’t wait.
On a slightly more sombre note, I want to pay my respects to a long time client (and friend) of mine, Gareth Haggerty, who passed away at the beginning of the year. I was asked to write the eulogy for his funeral, which I did, and I was honoured to hear it read to the hundreds (and hundreds) of mourners who turned up to pay their respects.
I mean it when I say it, that Wood with Words wouldn’t even be a business today without Gareth’s support and guidance, let alone my sole source of income.
I remember telling Gareth back in 2019 that my blogs would help him out, and if I’m honest, I didn’t know that for sure.
He took the chance and I’ll be forever grateful for that.
Thank you, Gareth.
Anyway, enough moping, there is stuff to do and words to write. Chat GPT and all the other little AI bastards don’t sleep, so neither can I, meaning it’s three hundred and sixty odd days of tap tap tapping at the Chrome Book…
…at least until it gives up and forces me to upgrade. Im not tight, far from it, but I am a creature of habit, and the thought of having to transfer all my passwords and that, over to a new piece of hardware, fills me with mortal dread.
Free Palestine, Fuck the Tories and Happy New Year.
Wood with Words


