2026 hopes/dreams/plans

OK, OK, OK, yes, we’re almost a full week in and I’m still collating my thoughts about the year to come. That’s too late, you might say! No, it’s not, I say!

There are still 51 weeks of the year left, and most of this first one was filled with a bank holiday and a weekend, so I’m really not being quite as slow and inefficient as you might think.

What will happen to scott manley hadley aka SOLID BALD in 2026?

Great question! And I don’t know!

I have very few solid [bald] plans, but plenty of hopes and dreams.

No resolutions, this year, though, as that feels like a childish thing to do at this point.

Every day I resolve to have a better life, I suppose. (Something like that?)

And I also don’t plan to do anything this year to rock the boat of the broadly successful (by my metrics, which probably aren’t yours) 2025 that just ended.

I liked working freelance and not full time! I’ll try and continue that for as long as it’s viable!

I liked doing performance regularly and I will continue to do that! I’ve got gigs in London, Brighton, Bexhill, Plymouth (or maybe Portsmouth, I need to double check that) and Glasgow booked in over the coming months.

COME SEE MY WIP IN GLASGOW!

COME SEE MY WIP AT THE BRIGHTON FRINGE!

I’ve got two Canadian weddings to attend this year, so it’s unlikely I’ll be travelling internationally anywhere else other than back to Ontario (where I lived for 3.5 years earlier in the decade) twice, though I’d love to squeeze in a mountain hike at some point this year, too.

I haven’t walked up anything tall since my child was born. (My last climbed mountain was Snowden almost three years ago.) Any mountains you can recommend within 4/5 hours of travel from London (ideally in the UK, but a short (cheap) European flight could work, too…)

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The world is a mess, geopolitically, yes, that’s an absolute and irrefutable truth. Maybe this will be a difficult year. Maybe it won’t be!

I joined the Green Party in 2025, impressed and excited by their commitment to hopeful politics.

I think there is a deeply destructive strain of British (and elsewhere) thought that teaches that optimism is childish, that compromise is maturity and that the status quo is sacrosanct.

I worked a couple of events last year with a Reform-supporting chef, and though I completely disagreed with what he understood to be the causes of lowered quality of life/increased cost of living in the UK and completely disagreed with what he proposed to solve those issues, there were many things that we both agreed were problems that needed to be addressed – increasingly poor healthcare services and outcomes, housing precarity, vacant high streets, isolation, poor nutrition, reduced access to education, etc.. (We also disagreed on some things that are/aren’t problems, but you could have probably guessed that. e.g., Why do right wing people hate the signs about not getting dehydrated on public transport so much???)

In Polanski, there seems to be – for the first time in years – a public political figure who is willing to engage with hefty topics without feeling obliged to scapegoat minorities or abandon clear messaging when pressed to do so. I like hope. I think we need it to be happy. A progressive, optimistic, clear voice is exactly what we need at this time. Count me in!

Will I try to get actively involved in the local Green party? Maybe. I don’t know. I’m shy, though they’ve said you can bring toddlers to some of their events, so maybe I’ll go with my child. Who isn’t shy.

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What’s coming in 2026 on the blog, you ask?

I’ve got an audio interview I need to edit and upload in the coming days, I have reflections on the 7 books I read in December raring to go, and I plan to try and read some big, big, heavy books this year. And some small, light, ones. And some medium ones. All sorts of books. All sorts of books.

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The other thing I want to do this year is to begin the process of major decluttering. I’m not going to be moving home this year, but when that does eventually come to pass I am going to need to have fewer things than I currently do. I don’t need books I’ll never read again. I don’t need clothes I’ll never wear again. I don’t need broken things I dream of one day fixing (I’m particularly referring to the undarned socks with holes in that I keep in a drawer).

We’ll see how that goes. We’ll see how it all goes.

But 2026 should be fun. I think.

Or, at the very least, it should be fine.

Thanks for reading and back again soon!