I like to think of this week as the year’s perineum. In 2025 we’re either going to hit the sweet spot or find ourselves even deeper in the … okay, that’s about as far as I’m going with that particular analogy.

I can’t say I feel thrilled that this year is over. After all, there’s another one starting next week. There’s just no end to it. One after the other, they keep on coming. The only way to stop the dreadful cycle is to die, and I’m not ready for that. Yes, I know it’s not entirely up to me, given the proliferation of homicidal maniacs, deadly viruses and unroadworthy taxis, but my life hasn’t yet become entirely intolerable.

2024 was better than most because I didn’t get divorced or remarried. My liver is ticking along nicely and on good days my brain fires on at least three cylinders. At optimal performance, the finely tuned brain fires on eight. Three works for me, though. Given the state of the planet and the brutalist architecture of humanity, you really don’t want to be too intelligent. Stupid people are generally the happiest, mostly because they’re too stupid to know they are stupid and they think the world is just fine as it is.

You’ve heard of endogenous neurogenesis, right? Actually, if you think the world is fine and people are great, you probably haven’t. Basically, it’s the process whereby brain cells regenerate. It’s the primary reason I drink. The faster they regenerate, the smarter and more depressed I get. So I have to keep drinking to kill off the new cells to avoid fully grasping the futility and awfulness of it all.

So, yes. I’m all for a bit of shrinkage in the old hippocampus. The trick is to strike a balance. You don’t want to outstrip regeneration to such an extent that you end up like Donald Trump.

Anyway. I have good news and bad news. The good news is that 570 babies were born across SA between midnight and midday on Christmas Day. That’s also the bad news.

The United Nations said the world’s population reached 8.2 billion in 2024. When the Flying Spaghetti Monster designed our planet, He didn’t have this many people in mind. This is why things are falling apart.

So when that festering swamp of incompetence and corruption known as the Department of Health congratulated the parents of these unforeseen consequences, I easily resisted the urge to break open the champagne and dance in the street.

Gauteng had the most, with 184 babies. Trailing far behind was the Western Cape, with a pathetic 18. Is it something in the water?

Every year, these numbers are proudly trotted out. Hurrah and well done, say the authorities, implying that babies born on Christmas Day are somehow special. Well, they’re not. That only ever happened once and it ended badly. It’s not like the parents of the 570 were deliberately aiming for a birth on 25 December. Most of these mewling ingrates were conceived on April Fools’ Day. It was the end of the month and there was enough money left over from payday to go out for dinner or drugs or whatever. The new moon was in Aries, and, according to astrologers, among the organs that were especially sensitive on this particular night were the tongue, gall bladder and penis.

I can’t remember if I had sex on 1 April this year. Now that I think about it, I can’t remember ever having had sex. Clearly one of the less rewarding spinoffs of my reverse neurogenesis strategy.

However, had I made the Catholic two-backed beast with a fecund vixen on that balmy Monday nine months ago, there is a good chance that mine would have been among the 570 brats born on Christmas Day. And the glasses through which I view the oncoming year would not be rose-tinted ones. Oh, no. They would be tainted with the vision of a geriatric and penniless me being wheeled into the spawn’s matric awards ceremony, drooling down my shirtfront and leering openly at the nubile young ushers.