2008: the year of the binbag

This time last year I made a list of some easy-to-stick-to resolutions I planned to follow to the letter.  These have also been floating around what used to be my desk (until Jim bought a piece-of-shit Vista desktop and took it over) so I would remember what I had said I would do.  Before I decide what I will undertake this year, let’s review last year’s aims and see how I did, shall we?

1.  End the year better off than I started it

Believe it or not I am ending 2007 much better off than I started it, thanks to a lot of luck and self-control.  In March I received a not inconsiderable windfall and ever since, financial prudence has ensured that I haven’t gone into the red again.  In twelve months I have gone from debt with no end in sight, to a credit balance and a regular savings plan.  It can be done!  And before you write it off as my simply getting some inheritance, I managed to rinse £2,500 back from my bank and credit card companies thanks to Martin Lewis.  I cannot overstate how much money you can reclaim if, like me, you have been a bit careless in the past.  Don’t just sit there: claim your money back!

2.   Actually go to the gym

And after starting on such a high, I must now grovel for forgiveness.  I have paid £17 per month for the gym, and actually completed a total of three workouts.  That means I have paid £68 for on-and-a-half hours on the treadmill, one hour on the cycle and the same on the rower.  Not exactly a return, is it?  Jim has been a model of good behaviour and gets up at 6.30am every day to hit the gym before eight o’clock.  I hit the shower at eight o’clock and still struggle to make it to work before nine.In my defence, it’s not been a total loss.  My gym subscriptions helped subsidise cheap classes in different sports like trampolining, on which I did enrol.  And I took Nathan, too – on the whole I think I probably recouped some of my money.  And had a GREAT time!

I am a natural on the tramp (and have some natty socks, too).  Next month: somersaults!

3.  Read more

Honestly, I haven’t had the time.  I have read sixteen books this year.  Not exactly staggering, is it?  But I have learned Sign language this year, which did require some of my reading time, I suppose.  Sixteen books: 1.3 books a month.  I can do better.

4.  Write more

Well, I’m not as far along with the novel as I would like, but I have joined a writing group which I really enjoy.  I know that writing groups have a bad rep - weekly meetings in the church hall where you make tea and talk about eachother’s divorces -  but it really has brought me on leaps and bounds in my writing.  The downside is that now I have to go back and rewrite whole sections of my novel because, having developed so much, I can see all the problems with everything I’ve written already.  At least it’s a good pain, eh?

***

So, what will I undertake in 2008?  There’s no point in committing to read and write more since I will have to do that now with the new writing group.  I can’t really finish off 2008 better off since, visa permitting, I will be moving to Australia before Christmas; and there’s no point in committing to the gym since it is apparent that I just don’t bother unless it involves jumping twenty feet in the air on a giant spring-loaded mesh.  Creative thinking is required, so here goes:

1.  Downsize

If the Australian Government agrees to grant us visas, Jim and I will be moving to Down Under in 2008.  At the moment, our little flat is busting at the seams with piles of thing; some sentimental, but mostly junk.  I’m not a hoarder on the whole, but you know how it is – you think something might be useful one day, or it has some tenuous sentimental link, or you might wear it again even though you shrank it/stained it/burned a cigarette hole in the arm (bastards).  This year, I pledge to reduce my stock of ‘stuff’ to shippable levels so that when we need to send it over to the other side of the world, we can do it in a couple of crates, rather than having to charter a ship of our own.

2.  Move my blog to its own website

I bought the domain, I’m just not technical enough to get it quite how I want it.  At the moment I’m struggling between WordPress and Moveable Type.  I like WordPress and it would be easier to move with, but the sidepanel thing on WP annoys me.  Have you noticed that all the type appears in a column down the centre of your screen?  I hate wasting all that space at the sides and Moveable Type goes right to the corner!  Revolutionary!  If anyone has an answer, let me know.  I’m pretty desperate.

3.  Apply for my MA

I want to do this and if we go to Australia, I am applying to University of Sydney.  If not, there are several places in the UK that I have thought about.  Now I have the means, and hopefully a more mature ability, it is stupid not to do something about it.  Enough stalling: time for some action.

4.  Get a six-pack

Alright, I know I said I wouldn’t promise to go to the gym, but when I get to Australia it will be the start of the summer.  There’s nothing I can do about my being the whitest thing on the beach, but I can certainly avoid looking like a bleached-out blimp.  I know all it takes is a few months of diligent work and I will be trim and super, but I’m just too fucking lazy.  2008 is the year of the workout!

Happy New Year!!!!

Sometimes they get it right.

The nights are drawing back out again already, if you can believe it.  Time seems to just fly by these days, and the shortest day of the year has already been and gone.  I was in the car on Thursday looking at the fog coming down and icing up the pavement, when I realised that in six months it will all be over and it’ll be another British summer.  Clearly recognising the cycle of time is a sign that (a) I’m getting old and (b) I think too much, but these are the kinds of epiphanies that hit you while you’re waiting at the lights.  I always say that I love winter till Christmas (and summer till my birthday) but this year I am really hoping it snows in January, February and March: if the Australian Government agree I’ll be spending next Christmas on the beach.  I realised in the car that this could be my last wintry Christmas ever.

There are any number of reasons that moving to Australia is preferable to living in Britain (I have obviously been persuaded that it’s a move worth making since I spoke about it in July) and I am beginning to look forward to it, but I think the complete reversal of the seasons will be one of the hardest things to handle.  I’m used to dark afternoons in December and a nice temperate evening on my birthday, and it will be the wrong way around down under.  I’ve been trying to savour the season, but finding time to enjoy it has been impossible.

Last week’s cop out list post could have been written by anyone: every single person I have spoken to seems to have been surprised by Christmas this year, and the number of things we all try to fit in before the big day just gets longer and longer.  Even trying to do the fun things gets to be a bit of a chore: another Christmas party, more meeting people for drinks that means shopping has to be moved to tomorrow lunchtime, make sure that you only take stuff to work on Friday you can leave there till the new year.  What a headache!  Friday was the last day at work and I tried to squeeze in so much work in the morning it turned into a comedy scene.  The anticipated early finish got earlier and earlier so that I found myself actually wishing I had more time in the office rather than hitting the red wine early doors.  And I was dressed as an elf.  I was finally wrenched away from my desk just before midday and the minute I was out I realised it didn’t matter: everything would still be there when I got back.

If you start drinking at lunchtime and you don’t have to go back to the office you know you are in trouble; especially when you have a party with your co-workers later the same night.  In an effort to break up the cocktail chaos, I had insisted that we all go to Light Up Bristol.  I had been expecting an enormous rowdy fayre with toffee apples and screaming kids, but at least there would be fresh air and a limited bar.  When we arrived it was completely different.  

 

Firstly, it was almost silent.  Light Up Bristol projects a light show onto the Council House (Bristol’s ‘City Hall’) and the Cathedral, all set to music.  There were no waltzers, hawkers or chip vans: everyone was transfixed.  There were a couple of kids racing around and jumping about, but even they sat down and watched after a while.  Second: the concept was so simple.  Project light onto a building; play music over it.  What’s complicated about that?  And yet it was totally effective.  The few of us who had walked through town to catch the show watched with our mouths open as our toes shrivelled up and our fingers went numb.

Pascale put it best: sometimes they get it right.  There are one hundred things to complain about in Bristol – the inept local council and rising taxes, the gang violence and gun crime, the laughably poor town planning and the non-existent transport policy – but every now and then something happens here that makes the shit all worthwhile: sometimes they get it right.  This is what Christmas should be about: quietly taking time to appreciate the good stuff; getting cold and not caring about it because you are enjoying the simple things.  I’ve got two weeks off to enjoy this Christmas and I plan to take it easy and enjoy it all.  This might be last one I spend with my friends and family for a while, so what is the point in racing around like a mad thing?  Take a breath, chill out and take it easy.  Everything else can wait.

 

Happy Christmas, all!  

‘Tis the season to be busy

• make costume for the AlterNativity party
• buy presents
• put the tree up
• go to the work Christmas party
• wrap gifts
• write and send Christmas cards
• decorate the flat
• make Christmas cards for family
• get e-mails up to date before work finishes on Friday
• steal the hoover from mum and dad after ours blew up
• arrange spa day with Basket
• find someone to come to the Spice Girls with me since James can’t make it (anyone?)
• prep the spare room for overnight guests
• get someone to fix the shower tray

Who said this was the season of peace?  Good job I’ve got two weeks off to get over the whole thing!  

Grey Paris

A short one this week as I am in Paris till Tuesday (don’t rob me while I’m gone, please).  The weather is pretty ghastly, but at least with some decent clouds you get beautiful skies like this:

and shots of the Eiffel Tower that you wouldn’t get in summertime:

all from the window of your hotel room.  In the meantime, here is a photo of some nice Christmassy trees on the Avenue des Champs Elysees.

So, whilst we can’t go stripping on top of L’Arc de Triomphe because it’s too cold, and anyway, it’s banned: 

James and I will be doing more of this: 

and this:

 

while you chumps are beavering away in the office.  Mwah ha ha ha!  Have a good one! 

Scrooge, eat your heart out.

Twenty-two shopping days till Christmas.   Everywhere I’ve been lately you can’t escape someone bemoaning how quickly it comes around and how it seems to get faster every year.  I was thinking about this: does it come quicker or is it just that we have more and more to do and not enough time to fit it all in?  I think the latter: even if you only make one new friend every year, it still accumulates into more parties, drinks, cards and presents than there are days in December.  No wonder everyone is knackered in January.  Christmas, like everything, is a double-edged sword.  For every great thing in the festive season, there’s something guaranteed to rile you, or more specifically, me.  

1. Perfume ads.  Deck your romantic existentialism with boughs of holly and shove it up your ass.  If life were really all beaches and soft focus we’d all be short-sighted and living in Tahiti.  Buying aftershave will not make you beautiful/successful/sporty/thin.  It will make you poor.
2. Slow moving shoppers.  I am 6’3″.  I have a very wide stride.  As a child my mother never made concessions for our being short and forced us to keep up with her.  I am a very fast walker.  At Christmas, all the dawdlers and gawkers hit the streets and get in my way.  I spend my lunch hours looking cross, tutting and sighing as people cut me up on the pavement.  I am also a master at the filthy look when some old codger smacks me with their shopping because they realised they just passed Laura Ashley without popping in.  This one especially annoys me because, being so tall, my groin is about elbow height for most elderly ladies.  A few years ago there was a fabulous suggestion to put pedestrian speed lanes on Oxford Street.  When I am Prime Minister, these will be everywhere and law-breakers will be shot in the knees.
3. Clubbing at Christmas.  There are some great Christmas tunes out there – Slade, Wizzard, Mariah Carey – and as the Big Day approaches you would think that the dancefloors might capitulate under the strain of festive revellers and play some of the classics towards the end of the night, but no: whilst every other whippoorwill is forcing Christmas cheer down your throats with shocking immodesty, the dancefloors seem determined to resist its very existence.  The temerity to ask for a Christmas tune earns scornful and shocked looks from DJs up and down the land.  What is so wrong with a spot of ‘Step Into Christmas’ in the season?  I want festive cheese!
4. Christmas countdowns.  Channel 4 are the worst for this.  The merest hint of festivity and normal scheduling goes out of the window in favour of Jimmy Carr presenting a four-hour marathon on ‘The Top 100 Greatest Sheds”.  No wonder everyone is so busy at Christmas: they’re all out on the streets pissing me off because they’re trying to avoid another mind-numbing instalment of “The World’s Greatest Vegetable Recipes”.
5. The weather.  Where is the snow, eh?
6. Sprouts.

I know these are all minor things, but the next time you are turning around in Waterstone’s and bash someone with your shopping, consider this: one man’s accidental knock is another man’s bollock-bashing biddy.  Now, if you will excuse me, ‘Cranford’ is on, and it’s just not Christmas without a BBC period drama at the start of winter.