The end of the year means it’s time to take stock of how things are going, what I’ve achieved and what I want to do next. Of course, some people would say that it’s no such thing. Some people would say it’s just an arbitrary time of year that happens to coincide with a calendar that was made up a few centuries ago so people would know when to the harvest the turnips. But you’ve got to start a journey from somewhere and the back end of 2014 – not a year that history is likely to remember fondly – is as good a place as any.

So how am I doing? Well in some respects, I’m doing…well… sort of okay. At the start of 2013 I felt isolated a lot of the time. I was also working for the financial sector. People often imagine working for a bank means being driven around looking like Robert Pattinson in Cosmopolis and gambling huge amounts of money on the stock exchange. In actuality, it mostly involves trying to explain to customers why your employer’s blatantly idiotic and self-defeating procedures are, for some reason, a good idea. Since then I’ve left my old job and become an adult student on a Counselling Diploma Course. I’ve managed to teach myself some basic digital art techniques, albeit using very old school software (though it would probably have seemed quite sophisticated in 1965. I think I would have been famous in 1965) and photographed lots of different places in Leeds.

As a result of becoming a student and grossly overestimating the part-time work market, I’ve also moved back home. In some ways this seems like an odd thing to have had to do approaching middle age and pretty much destroys any last pretence I had towards cool. But prior to moving back to my Mum’s house, I was so head-shreddingly lonely that I’d started to wonder if even my imaginary friends were having more fun than me. So it was a change for the better really.

So here I am, a few months away from completing my diploma and thinking about how I’m going to move my life forward now. I want a job. Ideally a satisfying one. And yes I know we’re in such bad economic times that people are expected to be grateful for work that even pays them but you have to have hope. I want to learn new digital skills. I need to find a cat-friendly house of my own. And I might even do the most clichéd thing possibly imaginable and look for one of those relationship things.

The upshot of all this is that over the next twelve months – between now and 16th December 2015, if Putin and the Kardashians don’t destroy the world between them in the meantime – I’m going to try and sort my life out. And, for your entertainment/bafflement, I’m going to blog a weekly update about how I’m getting on with it all.

So let’s get started and see what happens.

Damian