Ah January. Too many vowels, too little time, it rises baldly on the horizon, an awkward and needy wasteland. And we dash around upon it as if walking the dogs of our regrets, searching for our new selves in its bleak whiteness and swinging our dainty plastic bags of shit. We are looking for meaning or, failing that, some kind of structure within which we can enable change. A game, a routine, to help each other move forward with purpose.
I have a suggestion. Forget new year resolutions, forget dry January (which mad cow came up with this, by the way, this idea that January, a month of relentless rain, anxiety and sorrow, would be a good time to face reality head on, without even a colourful cocktail to take the edge off? Without even a little paper umbrella to protect us?). Instead, embrace the January transfer window. As in football, so in life – you have one month in which to barter and negotiate to create a new identity; a better, sleeker, more winning you. The deadline for decisions is dead strict and counted down live on clocks across the internet. There is something inspiring about the urgency, the pressure. It becomes its own sport.
But I am less interested in the million pound fates of Jadon Sancho or Aaron Ramsdale than I am in the urgent reshaping of mine and my friends’ lives. These are the teams I support. These are the athletes who I will trek out in the rain for and stand shivering and singing for even as they lose. Their pain and their happiness and their decisions about paint colours for the bedroom, this is my sport, this is why I scroll, refresh, refresh.
After a season of shared colds and bickering in Tescos along the south coast, many are eyeing relationship transfers, kissing a stranger in the smoking area, setting into motion the dramatic denouement of their current marriage. January is an excellent time to make your substitutions. Is it time? Look around. If you’re ready to find a new lover, simply everybody else will look hot. That hiker in the head-to-toe waterproofs muttering there’s no such thing as bad weather – yes. The suspicious checkout assistant who keeps their eyebrow fully raised when you’re trying to return an unwanted gift from your cousin – yes. The delivery driver who asks if they can use your loo and fills the house with the smell of smoked meat – yes.
Perhaps, instead of simply ushering in a replacement partner, you want to restructure the relationship itself and investigate polyamory, or consensual non-monogamy, or create a throuple or some other form of many syllabled entanglement. While news of such flexible experiments delights me, when I think about participating in such a relationship myself I am reminded of someone recently describing the special pain of cooking with garlic and how each clove has its own paperwork. But this admin is what the transfer window is perfect for: negotiate your terms, organise a medical and usher in a new signing, or a whole new team.
I had a haircut recently, which, returning home, was a shock for a number of reasons, the most lasting being the realisation that I do not present as the person I believe I am. When I asked for a short, messy bob, I assumed the hairdresser would look at me and understand what I meant. That she would see, if not quite a mischievous young punk, then at least someone with memories of nighttimes past, rather than, as became clear when I looked in the mirror at the end after she’d sculpted what she assumed was an appropriate cut, a middle-aged mum who had to rush back to get tea on.
It has spurred me to pay more attention to my appearance and use this transfer window to switch out my current look, a sort of “slouching towards Brent Cross” and replace it with something altogether more chic and dynamic. Rather than dieting or detoxing or any of that absolute silliness, what I am planning to do is alter the look in my eyes. Out with jolly exhaustion and in with a steely gaze, alert, reckless, a certain wild suspense. I am spending January learning how to style this new haircut less cosily, I am throwing out another bag of jumpers and I am adopting a new walk, the walk of somebody taller who has made better decisions. I am using eye cream at night and tanning drops in the day. In February, I intend to return to the hairdresser and test my new squad, by which, of course, I mean, see if this fresh combination of dignity and sass will lead to me emerging with the hair of a modern Debbie Harry, rather than Debbie, Harry’s mum who always wears a travel bumbag containing a massive set of keys.
Join me. Switch out grand ambition for focused slog, swap tired pettiness for rich passion, untested prejudices for educated compassion, buy in the bravery to be disliked, switch in pleasure: drink, smoke, sleep, sell off abstinence, bitterness, guilt. March out on to the pitch in February transformed – bigger, better, stronger, in a chic little haircut and absolutely exquisite shorts.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on X @EvaWiseman
