Come on 2015, let’s be having you

In a bit of a lull in the festive season, I have decided to get cracking on my new year’s resolutions.

I mentioned last year how I like to compartmentalise my past, and 2015 more than most years will give me ample opportunity to do so. This December has been very much a month of cutting off and letting go, and January will be a fresh start in more ways than one. I’m going to be so busy that if I manage to achieve anything at all, I’ll consider myself to be doing well, what with a couple of fairly hefty resolutions being more or less thrust upon me:

1. Do fantastically well in my first permanent post-qualification Library role.

The University of West London have very bravely agreed to take me on as Academic Support Librarian for their School of Nursing, Midwifery and Healthcare, and I will be starting on 5^th January. This is a logical sort of follow-up to my most recent role at LSHTM, but will also include a lot of new responsibilities, as well as a new institution in a new part of London, eventually within a new campus. I’m very excited, and a little bit terrified, but what I mostly am is grateful to be given such a great opportunity, and determined that UWL will have no reason to repent their choice. I plan to exceed their expectations and expand my own experience, and this is the main thing I intend to devote my energy and resources to this year.

2. Make a home

Having been saving about a third of our incomes for four years, my other half and I are finally ready, at 30, to join the adult population and buy our first home. I know this is something most people do, and often much earlier than we have managed it, but I am still unreasonably proud of us for having reached this point at last. Things are now moving fast – I put in an offer on a very nice flat just yesterday, and while that is of course no guarantee the whole thing is all sewn up, I’m excited by the idea that we may very soon be shutting our very own front door, growing weedy tomatoes in our very own back garden, and screaming blue murder when our very own boiler explodes and costs a small fortune of our very own money to repair. Ho for belated grown-up-ness!

Frankly, I think those two things together will be enough to be getting on with, don’t you? 

No?

Oh all right then…

3. Devise and keep up a new fitness regime

New job has the slight disadvantage of being the other side of bloody London to where I live (one and a half hour commute each way is looking likely). This is going to throw my fitness regimen (such as it is) all to hell – farewell, lovely scabby affordable ULU Energybase!

I’m going to have to come up with a new one that fits in with my new life, or resign myself to ever-encroaching blobbery. I fear that workout DVDs at sparrow’s fart may be involved (sorry, downstairs). And maybe even Kegels on the train (will have to learn not to make that funny face when doing them).

4. Make lots of jam and chutney and foist it upon my friends and loved ones.

Not much to enlarge on here. I have the kit, I have the jars, I have the time. Beware, oh friends, an avalanche of preserves is coming your way.

5. Get more involved in my profession

Conferences; articles; the Twittersphere. There’s a lot of library-based action going on out there, and I want a part of it.

6. Make some progress on my family photographs archive

Work on this was brought to a slight standstill last year when my laptop up and died. The Apple Genius said that it was the logic board, but I believe it was simply a dirty protest against having to receive so many scans of my gurning infant visage. New logic board is now in place, so we shall find out who was correct in the coming months.

7. Make a start on The Quilt

Along with the crates of photographs my mother offloaded on me (see blogs passim), I also received a rather lovely thing: the top half of a patchwork quilt. It’s in a thousand shades, with scraps of a huge range of vintage fabrics, all tacked with newspapers and magazines of the period it was made. It was pieced and stitched together by my mother and grandmother back in my mother’s late teens, a time when she and my nan could barely me in a room together without biting each other’s heads off. I like to imagine them stitching up the quilt together as a sort of stalemate or truce. A year or so ago Mum suggested I might like to finish it off, as I had been making a desultory attempt to learn quilting from my very gifted craftswoman, my boyfriend’s mother Pat Ashton-Smith. It has ever since been scrunched up in a bag under my desk. This year, I want at least to get it padded and pinned preparatory to stitching it up – in the long run, I’d like to give it to my niece, so that it will have passed through the hands of four generations of the family.

And those left over from last year…

8. Finish knitting this jumper…

…if only so I can start knitting something else. I am sick of the sight of the damn thing.

9. Learn French

If there’s one thing long commutes must be good for, it is surely listening assiduously to the adventures of Didier and Patrice and the improbable series of events that lead them into reciting irregular verbs by the hour. Oui je peux!

10. Write. Write write write write write!

It’s been a good year for writing. I’m going to keep it up. Watch this space for more gibberish, excerpts of novels in the works, book reviews and maybe even some poetry (oh God).

EDIT: and a few more…

11. Pass my driving test

Self-explanatory really.  This will seal the holy trinity of adulthood – employed, property-owning driver 😛

12. Birth Companions

I am doing some voluntary literature search work for Birth Companions, a very worthwhile organisation.  Finally have some time to devote to this over the holidays, and will be proud to get it done and hopefully help them extend their influence.

SECOND EDIT: and two more…

13. Self care

I am extremely bad at this.  I am going to make 2015 the year I give myself a thorough and long overdue MOT – actually register with a doctor and a dentist, and sort out a few niggling problems that have been hanging around (and no doubt getting worse) for years out of idleness.  I’m an old girl now, can’t just keep expecting things to sort themselves out.

14. Join the British Bone Marrow Registry

Saw an interesting feature about bone marrow donation on TV over Christmas, and read some more on t’interweb – it really doesn’t sound as horrible as I imagined it, and it offers a fairly unique opportunity to save somebody else’s life without having to do anything unreasonably heroic (I am a colossal wimp, so this is useful).  I’m already signed up for someone to have any of my bits and bobs once I am dead – no reason not to offer up the regenerating parts whilst still alive.

And one more for luck…

15.  Learn to jive

Got a swing dance class with Swing Patrol for a Christmas present, which I just cashed in.  I SUCK like the suckiest thing to ever suck, but I loved it.  I am going to follow this up and get splendid at dancing, like the fabulous ladies I saw tonight whose calves seem to be spring-loaded.