New Year

New Year is a threshold of modest intentions rather than a clean reset for Queenie Jenkins. As one year gives way to another, she writes resolutions in a pink leather Moleskine, misses the midnight countdown, and reaches toward Tom with a message of hope. The turn of the calendar offers a structure for trying again, but her plans already contain an expectation of failure, and the new year begins with old relationships still unresolved.

Writing the Resolutions

While eating pizza and watching Jools Holland’s dependable New Year’s Hootenanny, Queenie reaches into her dressing table and takes out a pink leather Moleskine she has not yet managed to soil. The detail makes the notebook a surface she is cautiously preserving even as she uses it to record intentions. Her resolutions begin not with a grand transformation but with an effort to be kinder and more patient: she names commuters who push onto the Tube before passengers can get off, colleagues who complain about money despite having parents who bought them a house, and housemates whose elaborate shared-kitchen cooking makes it difficult for her to prepare basic pasta and sauce. The list draws self-improvement directly from the irritations of ordinary life, including the unequal circumstances she notices around her.

The second resolution, for better vibes across her life and day, is much broader than the first. That movement from specific grievances to a sweeping mood-setting ambition captures the list’s mixture of practical attention and vagueness. The plan is not simply to behave differently toward particular people; Queenie also wants a more general change in how her days feel. Yet the resolutions do not present that change as assured. She later acknowledges that challenging herself to do anything at all has already set her up to fail, and reasons that limiting the resolutions might make failure less disappointing. Her self-assessment turns the act of planning into a negotiation with anticipated disappointment.

An Uneven List and a Missed Midnight

The resolutions include work as well as personal conduct. Queenie reads the list to Darcy Betts but deliberately skips item 3d, the self-reproachful intention to work harder for a promotion and spend less time chatting with Darcy. The omission shows that the list is not only a private inventory: some of its ambitions bear on her friendship and working life, and she chooses not to share every one. At the other end of the list, item 11 asks whether she should go to therapy, qualifying the question with the more tentative thought that she might at least consider it. It is an intention, not a report that she has begun treatment.

After finishing the list, Queenie eats an entire pizza, takes the grease-soaked box outside, and pushes it into an overflowing recycling bin. Cheers and church bells reach her from outside, but she has missed the countdown. The small anticlimax resists the idea of a perfectly observed New Year’s transition: the symbolic moment passes while she is occupied with the ordinary aftermath of eating and disposing of the box. Her response is brief—another year has begun—rather than celebratory or catastrophic. The resolutions remain the more deliberate marker of the occasion, even though she has already framed their fulfilment in terms of possible failure.

Carrying the Old Year Forward

The new year also appears in Queenie’s message to Tom. She wishes him a happy New Year, hopes the year will be better for them than the last, and signs off with an X. Tom replies with a matching greeting and X. The exchange is warm in form but restrained in what it establishes: Queenie voices a hope about their shared future, while Tom returns the greeting without spelling out what that future will be. The message therefore offers a point of contact, not evidence that their difficulties have been settled.

On 2 January, that brief reply shapes how Queenie reads the silence elsewhere. After an encounter with Darcy Betts in which she objects to the rush to commit to a relationship and spills milk across the kitchen counter, she says she is only tired. She takes Darcy to a quiet room and reads her the resolutions, still omitting the work-related item about chatting with her. At work, Queenie starts around lunchtime and realizes she has not heard from Ted. She treats that silence as potentially good, then contrasts it with Tom’s reply, which she takes comfort in because it includes an X. The early days of the year thus place her two unresolved attachments side by side: uncertainty about Ted’s motives remains, while Tom’s small sign of affection gives her a more hopeful reading of the immediate moment.

Significance

New Year functions as a brief interval in which Queenie can give uncertainty a list-shaped form. The resolutions range from patience in crowded public spaces and shared domestic life to work ambitions and the possibility of therapy; they register both her wish to change and her skepticism about her ability to do so. Missing the countdown punctures the promise of a decisive fresh start, while the message exchange with Tom supplies a gentler, equally incomplete sign of renewal. The calendar changes; Queenie’s circumstances do not suddenly resolve. Instead, the new year begins with intentions written down, a relationship still carried in a hopeful greeting, and another silence whose meaning she has yet to learn.