Happy 2014, one and all! Well, nearly. I like to get the jump on the new year, as, for me, it is always a time of great change (real or anticipated). I am a huge fan of the whole new year shebang – the party, the countdown, the kiss, and the slew of earnest resolutions more honoured in the breach than the observance. I am not even slightly cynical about it. New year, new start. Again.
It’s the hopefulness I like, and the impetus the new year gives me to reanimate my spirit from whatever rut it has worn itself into in the preceding year – a shot in the arm, a shake awake, and a timely (hah!) reminder that life is passing, and won’t come again – and that really, truly, it is not good enough to spend weeks at a time achieving nothing more remarkable than an encyclopaedic knowledge of the various ailments suffered by the characters of Tenko. It is the opportunity for change.
As I get older, new year is taking on even greater significance, as the pace of change that life imposes on me on its own account (as opposed to the chosen changes I laboriously will into being) slows down.
Between leaving school and my late 20s, life hustled me along with gratifying haste. First I had a gap year, an experience that hooked me on the intoxicating drug of constant change for its own sake, of always having somewhere else to go. Then university, which although a solid stint of three years, was a constant cycle of change – first this flat, then that, these friends then those, this unit and then the next, exams, holiday plans, dead time followed by deadline, on and on. Then two masters degrees, interspersed with full-time jobs that lasted for six months, eight months, ten months – between 2007 and 2010, I lived in a different city every year.
I liked being able to earmark chunks of my past based on some significant aspect like that – the city I lived in, the qualification I obtained, the job I had, the person I loved, each year a discreet unit with little long term overlap. I liked the simplicity and the variety of it, and this preference seeped into other aspects of my life – although I am always buying things, I tend to give a lot of things away; although I have passionate connections to my friends, the oldest and best of them will tell you how hopeless I can be at keeping in touch. The wheel turns and I turn with it, keen for renewal, for the new.
However, as I stare down the barrel of 30, I realise that wheel is slowing down, and that I am… accreting. I have lived in the same city for four years, the same flat for two; I have been in the same job (a proper, full-time, permanent, professional job) for 18 months. I save money, I own furniture, I am planning to buy a flat as soon as may be. I am becoming (belatedly) a grown-up. This is both gratifying and terrifying in equal measure. It is as if hitherto I have been a liquid, sloshing around from corner to corner and shape to shape, and now I am solidifying at an alarming rate, becoming the person I will have to live with for the rest of my life. If I allow it to happen, I will turn around in five or ten years time and find that I remain, give or take a few wrinkly bits, the exact same person that I am today, and will have simply lived out several repetitions (with minor variations) of the same year. The world will permit that; it no longer demands change, or choice. It is I myself who must demand it, if I want it.
And I do; I want to keep on changing, to keep on learning, to keep on opening doors of possibility rather than letting them shut behind me. I want to continue to be able to say, “that was they year that I achieved that goal/had that experience/made that start.” And so I do what I do every year around this time – I make a list of hopes and dreams, call them resolutions, and make a promise to myself to try to change, to learn, to open the doors. Here’s to 2014, the year that I:
1) Give up drinking for January.
OK, it’s hardly stunning in its originality, nor is it exactly challenging; but being booze free for a time gives me the time, the money and the energy to do the other things I want to do.
2) Learn to preserve food.
This one’s a bit folksy, but I really love the idea of making my own jams and pickles. Last year, on a trip to the US, I fell so in love with pickles that I bought this brilliant book from the overwhelmingly vast and wonderful Powell’s bookstore in Portland, flew back home full of good intentions… then stuffed it on a shelf and forgot about it for eight months. Fail. 2014 will be the year that I put food in jars. Mmmmm, botulism, here I come.
3) Finish knitting this dratted jumper.
I have been knitting the same jumper for about two years. At one point, I left it for so long it got weevils and had to be fumigated. This is getting ridiculous. Just. Do. It.
4) Start writing this dratted novel.
Even more shameful than an unfinished novel is a novel you never began. For getting on 10 years (yes, that’s right, 10 years) I have been claiming to be ‘writing a novel’ about Caravaggio. Thus far, it consists of about 4000 words total of miscellaneous first draft scraps, including one passage referred to in my house as the ‘sex in a cupboard’ scene, which out of context (and as there is no novel, there is no context) just sounds wrong. This is EMBARASSING, and must be remedied.
5) Learn French.
I don’t want to live in the UK for the whole of the rest of my life. I don’t have any solid plans or immediate intentions, but one day, I want to live and work abroad. French specifically may or may not be useful, but it’s good to keep your hand in with languages.
6) Get fit.
2013 may not have been the standout most exciting year of my life, but it did contain one notable feature – I got fit. Not Schwarzenegger fit – I doubt that that is either achievable or desirable for a pudgy English girl – but daily exercise, bags of energy and endorphins, I-can-feel-my-muscles-when-I-walk fit. I hardly looked different at all, but I felt fantastic. And then my birthday and Christmas came along, and an orgy of overindulgence has left me bloated, lazy and knackered. I want to feel fantastic again.
7) Let my work into my life.
It’s time to can this attitude I’ve had that paid work and my “real life” are mutually exclusive. I think this is a hangover from my uni days, when the need to have a paying part time job (or jobs) alongside my full-time study meant that it was very important to carve out time that wasn’t for work, and wasn’t for study – clearly demarcated ‘me’ time in which I could abandon the otherwise omnipresent guilty feeling that whatever I was doing, I probably ought to be doing something else. In real terms, it means that I turn up to a job and I work, hard, and for as long as is necessary to get the work done to the best of my ability – but when I go home that’s that. This doesn’t actually make the slightest bit of sense anymore, given that I am finally working in a field that interests and challenges me, and about which I have some actual opinions. I’ve met lots of knowledgeable, passionate people working in information, and I want to be one of them. I want to be talking about it, learning about it, and getting involved in a way that goes beyond what is relevant to the specific task I’m doing at the time.
8) Be a good mentor.
Through my job, I’ve been able to get involved in an email-based pupil mentoring programme, and have been paired with a really, nice, smart girl who’s just started her GCSEs. I want to do my very best to help her achieve her goals this year.
9) Pick up my trumpet.
I have a (slowly rusting) trumpet under the bed. Time to get it out and start pissing off the neighbours.
10) Write. Write write write write write!
This is the big one. Writing used to be my LIFE. It was all I did, all I wanted to do – I still have a trick of mind where I narrate my life to myself in my head as I’m living it, because I used to write as naturally as breathing. Most of it was ghastly bad, of course, but that’s beside the point. The sheer volume of my creative output, and the pleasure it used to give me, was spectacular. And it still gives me a buzz like nothing else. Even now – writing what is essentially a glorified shopping list – watching the sentences appear on the page, reaching for the word that will work, is the best feeling I have had all day. I am going to commit to writing something creative – a bit of novel, a blog post, even a poem (God help us all) – at least three times a week.
That’s probably enough to be getting on with for now. Loads of other things I’d like to do, and hopefully will, but these ten resolutions will give me something to goad myself into action with when all I want to do is slump down on the sofa and read Damn You, Autocorrect for five hours straight.
Any encouragement, suggestions or lists of your own will be received with interest!
Everything is better in a Fairisle Sweater 