From the Notebook of Dante Papier

Dante Papier is the mind-child of Novlr Author Daniel Piper, whom you can find on Instagram and substack and you can buy his book here. He has a column here on the Novlr blog (read his intro here). Enjoy.

It strikes me as odd that we only count down to midnight once a year. Is not every day we spend on this earth a gift worth celebrating? Is not January 2nd as precious as January 1st? Should not every new day be seen in with cheers? From today, I vow to celebrate every new morning with just as much joy and jubilation as New Year’s Day.

UPDATE: Am beginning to suspect my new regime is not sustainable. My nightly midnight countdowns are proving unpopular with those around me. Not one person has said Happy New Day back to me. Am also on my 6th hangover in as many days.

New Year’s Resolutions:

• Maintain the current high quality of my daily thoughts, musings and observations
• Maintain my current healthy disregard for fame, followers and social media
• Continue to not care what others think of my writing
• Consider not even publishing my writing online?
• Leave it all in a box in the attic to be discovered when I am dead
• Become famous when dead
• No
• Continue to not care about fame
• Join TikTok
• No
• Remove allonline presence
• Live in hut
• Write masterpiece while living in hut
• Publish masterpiece online
• Gain 1M followers
• No!
• Destroy masterpiece immediately after finishing it
• Burn it?
• Eat it
• Livestream eating of masterpiece
• Gain 1M followers
• No!
• Maintain current disregard for fame
• Maintain current disregard for followers
• Destroy all of my work after writing it
• Eat it
• What if written on iPad?
• Eat iPad
• Eat Bluetooth keyboard too?
• No!
• Stop.
• Relax.
• Breathe.
• You are enough.
• Live laugh love.
• Maintain my current healthy disregard for resolutions and the concept of self-improvement in general
• Lose half a stone

Went to the sandwich shop. The man in front of me in the queue was a busy type with a smartphone. When it was his turn, he asked, without looking up from his phone, for a sandwich on brown bread. When the sandwich lady asked which sandwich, he repeated, a sandwich on brown bread. It was only when she asked a second time which sandwich that he looked up at her and said, Oh, sorry, I meant a BLT on brown bread. When it was my turn, I raised an eyebrow and skilfully ordered a coronation chicken sandwich with extra lettuce on white bread in a single attempt.

It seems to me that one of the greatest taboos in contemporary society is to speak ill of David Bowie. Was he really that good? Was he really that much better than, say, Darius Danesh or ‘H’ from Steps?

Another supermarket self-checkout debacle. I realised whilst scanning that I had accidentally picked up a vegan frozen curry containing, instead of chicken, soy-based meat alternative pieces. I attempted to cancel the item but ended up accidentally scanning it another six times. To avoid the embarrassment of explaining to a cashier that I had not spotted that the curry contained soy-based meat alternative pieces, I fled the scene – only to be followed out of the door by another shopper. Please don’t take this the wrong way, she said to me on the street, but could you not afford to buy that food? Before I could tell her that I simply did not like the sound of the soy-based meat alternative pieces, she produced the curry from her bag and handed it to me. Whilst I did appreciate her kindness, just as I suspected, the soy-based meat alternative pieces tasted of absolutely nothing.