It’s definitely not a good sign when you start looking around your workplace (in my case, at least part of the time, a book shop) for likely opportunities to injure yourself just badly enough to extort millions from the company – but, damnit, I need cash! I feel very strongly that I should have more than lots of other people – is it so wrong to have a dream?

January is also a bad time to not have a life-plan up your sleeve to whip out on demand at that perennial question: ‘So what is it you want to do eventually?’ Dreams are one thing, but rarely can you make them stand up in front of that horrible, horrible question. Like a giant x-ray beam, it strips away all those cosy little plans and notions you have but never examine too closely in case they swirl away on a passing breeze. A friend of mine has come up with one solution – never leave the education system: after finishing a degree, he went on to do a Masters, and now is mucking around doing a PhD, which, apparently, doesn’t have a specific timeframe attached – 10 years is acceptable! That’s one way to put off real life, I guess, but there’s only so much learning I can stomach. The ends are fine, of course, but the means are the problem – the process… oh all right, I admit it – the goddamn work! There’s so much to be distracted by out there; just yesterday my flatmate came home with the first series of Deadwood – which would I rather do of an evening: read about the Holocaust for my History degree, or spend a quality few hours developing a whole new vocabulary of expletives? What a great-looking show, there’s no doubt about it… but why do I keep having to stop myself calling everyone I meet a ‘piss-pot fucking cocksucker’?

One of my principal distractions is, and always will be, music – and what a year it’s been to be distracted. Both in ecstasies of discovery and speechless fury at the lows to which so many people seem determined to fall. Coldplay Vs. Crazy Frog. How depressing. But is it really? I don’t have to listen to both, do I? I don’t have to go to the gym/origami class/whatever, and I don’t need to reassess everything I do just because it’s January and the start of a new year. OK, maybe I should stop spending silly amounts of money on anything new and shiny like some demented magpie on speed, toting a Visa card, but hey! I think in January we get so obsessed with worrying about the future that it’s easy to forget the good stuff from last year. It’s always the ends, never the means… but the means don’t have to be the work – sod the endgame, put on a record you love and snuggle under the covers whilst it’s freezing cold outside. There’s plenty of fun stuff to be getting on with – and listening to – and at the warm and ever-so-slightly kinky fireplace of uk-fusion, we’ll be letting you know exactly what that stuff will be.

So when they ask, ‘what do you want to do eventually?’ I think I have an answer after all. I don’t know – but I’m damn well going to have fun finding out.