2009-the year of the beer

Trust me, I’ve been there

EVERY NEW YEAR, I EMBARK ON A Project: A Whole New Me. It’s not just boring stuff like weight loss and going to bed early. It’s a whole smorgasbord of positive new traits, like serenity (that was 2003), kindness (circa 2006), and a renewed zeal for the life of the mind (1998). How many Aprils of Disillusionment will it take before I realise that none of this is going to happen, not ever? Mind you, I did in the search of serenity go in a floatation tank that year. So it wasn’t all a total waste of headspace.

Anyway, just as I was about to start making my list for 2009 – perhaps become more explorative? Adventurous? Maybe expand horizons by talking to a fresh stranger every Tuesday? – I realised what year it was, ie, almost 2010. Why not take a fresh approach, I thought. Instead of vowing to be a better person, why not vow this year to be worse? Why not get it completely out of my system, so that I can start afresh in 2010 not just for a new year, but for a new decade? Anybody who has given up smoking more than once, which is anybody who has ever given up smoking, will understand this thinking – when the time comes, what day do you give up? No, not Thursday, idiot, Sunday. If it’s already November, do you do it in December? You do not, you smoke like a chimney all the way through yule and give up in January. It’s a clean slate thing. Clean slates do not start at the end of weeks, or months, or years, or, it turns out, decades. So for 2009, I am going to be as delinquent, as unenviable, as messy as I can possibly be. I am not going to broaden my horizons, and I am not going to try new things. Cheerio St Petersburg, hello Ibiza. I’m going to have one more year using insufficient sunscreen, of insufficient protection factor, in insufficient quantities – and it goes without saying this will be one more year with too much sun. Oh, and fun. One more year pretending not to smoke, then pinching fags off 25-year-olds like their drunk spinster aunt. One more year pretending to think a glass of wine is one unit, when actually I know it’s three. One more year without one single trip to a museum, not even a free one that’s just around the corner. One more year reading Jilly Cooper potboilers I know off by heart, when it would actually be more intellectually nutritional to read the licensing agreements of software downloads. One more year eating baked beans instead of edamame beans.

You know, the irony is, now I’ve written it down in a list, I probably won’t be able to stick to it.