*voice That I Think Is My Inside Voice But In Fact Carries Throughout A Room Without My Consent* MY DEAR

*voice that I think is my inside voice but in fact carries throughout a room without my consent* MY DEAR FRIENDS, colleagues, comrades in arms, the kind young woman who helped me when I got hopelessly lost in the MRT yesterday: GOOD MORNING! Can you believe it? It is half way through November and nearly December and Christmas!

This is a friendly yet forceful reminder, that Alex Rider - against all odds still a teenager, has killed approximately 15 people and made terrible puns about it but still mourns his late maths homework, proud wearer of frosted tips like a hacker in a 90s movie, rode a horse he hated into a train tunnel after a girl he also hated - once escaped a fake private school in which a clone of a megalomaniacal neo-Nazi had been surgically altered to look like him, RETURNED TO THAT SCHOOL to flush out said neo-Nazi, and later got a Facebook friend request from the clone and rejected it BECAUSE HE DIDNT REMEMBER WHO THEY WERE.

It’s been tough recently, so let us take this specific Alex energy with us into December and the new year: let us never give up a fight -I believe that we can gather ourselves and go back and this time with a fucking snowmobile. Our crisis haircut doesn’t define us, even when our friends lie and say it’s ok. Most importantly it’s always justified to refuse a Facebook request from a weirdo who we don’t remember spouting rubbish.