Of the Resolutions for 2011, I missed on: city breaks, reading all the books I'd bought but hadn't read yet, project Coriander, and I thought about my age rather more than I should.
City breaks are expensive, especially compared to twice as many days on the coast, because city hotels are expensive, unless I stay in some Holiday-Inn chain at the end of the transport lines. Reading the books is a never-ending task, as I keep buying new ones. Age? I know damn well I'm thinking about that as a way of staying away from women I know I won't choose well and will therefore want to be away from in a very short time. So those items are off the resolutions list. On the other hand, if I don't resolve to take holidays I won't, as not taking holidays is what I do by default, and if I don't count the gym as a resolution, I'm falling into the trap of making last year's resolutions this year's routines. Which is a fine way of filling my diary before I start. So I'm going to drop the ones that don't work and keep the ones that do and I need to make an effort to do.
What do I want to change about what I did in 2011? There's the not-having-a-girlfriend bit, which is a little beyind the scope of New Year's Resolutions. There's the fact that my Saturdays seem to go by in a haze of nothing-much and I have a very high reluctance to venture into the outside world then - unless it's sunny, I wake up early and the Metropolitan Line is working, when I may well go for breakfast in Notting Hill. I need to do something about Saturdays - I know I should be able to do nothing all day - except cook, iron and clean bits of the house (that's "nothing" when you're single) - and not get a guilty conscience about it, but I don't. Call it "Make Saturday Special" for the moment and make it mean something later.
So here's the list for 2012.
1. Spitalfields isn't Soho - get over it and set off for the Central Line prompt at 17:00
2. go to the gym at least three days a week
3. not eat chocolate late in the evening and avoid excess carbs at lunchtime
4.1 take two week-long holidays abroad and a couple of short breaks in the UK
4.2 one weekend, take the sleeper to and from Penzance
5. spend more time researching stuff that's useful to my various projects
6 do my "36 Views of St Mary Axe" photography project
7 read "Finding Time Again" so I've "read Proust"
8. Make Saturday Special - details to follow
9. make the best of the seven-week Olympic period
10. errr... that's it.
(Resolution 9 does not mean what you think it means.)
So let's see how I do with this. I need to do a couple for work as well, but I'm not going to think about those just yet.
You're a bloody good writer!
ReplyDeleteRegarding Make Saturdays Special, I take it that you know about Meet-up groups? Google it, there are loads of them around and somewhere in that haystack, there is bound to be the needle that you have been looking for.
Good luck with 2012