2024

What I did this year

These are some things I did and were done to me this year. What about you?

Media Appearances

As usual, I gave several interviews to media on both sides of the Atlantic. These included discussing translation with The Harsha Reality Podcast; chatting about music, humour and cultural experiences with Yaya Diamond; and one with Kiss 104.7 Radio that covered most of my body of work.

I also made regular appearances on Hannah’s Bookshelf at Radio North Manchester in the ‘What Are You Reading’ slot. Books I talked about included ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, the poems of Dennis O’Driscoll, and the works of Isabel Allende.

Paid Work

I continued working a campus job that I started in September 2023. It is thoroughly enjoyable, albeit unstable and sporadic.

I have also been in an office job since April. It is a huge privilege and relief to have an office to go to, and the discipline and structure that come with it. I won’t be able to reveal much about the job until March 2026 at the very earliest. But it is dull, dry, and just right for me.

Creative Work

For the fifth straight year, my main creative activity has been The Kev, a bawdy musical persona who also does skits and jokes.

This was a year in which creative ideas didn’t just find me, I had to forage for them. The first song I finished was a rewrite of ‘Believe’. A sweet, seductive satire of the positive psychology industry, it had long been one of my favourite songs in premise, but not execution. This year I rectified it.

I had long wanted to write a song about ancestors, after reading this article in Aeon about how our existence is utterly astonishing. Eventually, I came out with this one:

I had also wanted to write a song about the crisis of masculinity, so wrote this one. And I wanted to write one about sexual freedom, so wrote this one. Like most of my songs, they start off conventional, before veering into the surreal.

With each of these songs, I filled pages upon pages with ideas and scribblings-out. Then finally at the end of the year, this song idea just kind of found me, and I finished it in one sitting:

I finished one comedy skit, but the satire wasn’t landing, so I canned it. Next year I will start using ChatGPT to generate ideas.

There’s a really great short story by Nathan Englander called ‘The Reader’, which appears in his collection ‘What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank’. My takeaway from it is that for the miniscule proportion of creatives who achieve fame and fortune, it ends up being bitter-sweet at best.

In 2024, I had one headline gig, and attendance was so poor that I can probably recycle most of the material and it will bring the house down at some point in the future. This rendition of ‘The Great British Indie Song’ at an open mic will have to go down as the on-stage highlight of the year:

Prose

This year saw my favourite achievement involving prose fiction, and second favourite involving the Chinese language. I finally found a publisher for the short story ‘The Singing of the Bluebird’ by Yuan Jinmei, which I first read in Chinese magazine 《读者》 (The Reader) in spring 2014. It took all those years to track down the author and get her permission.

I also wrote multiple Substack essays on topics including fame, romance, shyness, careers, near-death experiences, and being middle-class. It would have been nice to have them published, get paid, and have a much larger readership, but editors are busy people, and getting their attention is as hard as promoting a gig.

As someone who constantly seeks validation, I have not completely given up on writing for international media. In Asian Cha Journal, I wrote reviews of ‘The Flowers of Lhasa’ by Tsering Yangkyi, ‘Kingdom of Characters’ by Jing Tsu, ‘Heart Sutra’ by Yan Lianke, and ‘The Fox Wife’ by Yangsze Choo.

Guitar

I see myself as much more of a musician than a comedian, so am keeping the Kevin McGeary Guitar YouTube channel active. My online beginner lessons, and intermediate lessons tend to get pretty good web traffic.

And I also recorded classical guitar videos

And pop covers for my own amusement.

Languages

At the start of December, I made it to a 1000-day streak on Duolingo. I am just about conversant in Spanish now. I also started Arabic and have done a bit of it every day but will probably need to hire a tutor to get anywhere with it.

My Monday Mandarin YouTube channel is still going strong. Of all my projects, it is the one I try least hard at, but the one that gets the most organic following. YouTube highlights this year included ones on China’s business culture, religious history, and the China Book Club series.

Wider World

As with every year, I have written a lot of stuff and made a lot of music but am no more famous than I was at the start of the year. But anyone who thinks that being famous is enviable probably hasn’t been reading enough news.

Liam Payne’s pop-star lifestyle drove him to an early grave. Neil Gaiman, one of the world’s most famous authors, looks set to go down big time over historic sexual misconduct. Blake Lively became an international hate figure for some mildly mean-girl behaviour in a years-old interview and a few other ill-judged remarks.

Vice President Kamala Harris, despite being endorsed by almost every major celebrity, from Taylor Swift to Beyoncé to Oprah, lost the U.S election to former president Trump. It’s hardly surprising that celebrity endorsements have turned out to be worthless, considering what the world has learned about celebrities. P Diddy being behind bars is probably just the beginning of what will be revealed about celebrity culture, a phenomenon that is as irrational as the medieval church.