Resolution

As ever, I considered making a resolution for the New Year. And also, as ever, I couldn’t think of one. The last significant resolution I had was in 1993 when I resolved to give up smoking from 1st January 1994. Surprisingly, given my normal lack of willpower, I succeeded and the only time I have smoked since has been in my dreams when I have scrabbled around various tobacconists trying to find some Peter Stuyvesants. Since then, there’s been nothing I’ve felt worth giving up.

I am well aware that Christmas levels of drinking need to be reduced, but I am buggered if I am doing anything daft like Dry January. I know this would give me a golden opportunity to show how great I am to my handful of friends and followers on social media, but what’s the point? January is bad enough without drinking or going to the pub and drinking diet fucking coke. No, I’ll cut down, that’s what I’ll do.

And I need more exercise given my current levels of unfitness. Mental health ‘experts’, who are often people who have read something on Facebook (see also conspiracy theorists), say that all you need to do to improve your mental health is to run a 10k every hour on the hour and, as with Dry January, there is a golden opportunity to utilise social media to show your friends how good (you don’t) look in a pair of tight shorts and a vest. Look: my mental health is one of the main reasons I DON’T get out much. Only someone who doesn’t understand clinical depression would say to me something dumb like, “Go out and take some exercise – it will do you good”. It doesn’t work like that, at least not with all of us. So, what do I really, REALLY want to do this year? And how realistic is it?

I want to complete the non-awaited follow-up to my first book ‘Corfu not a scorcher‘ and publish it to a world that isn’t waiting. This will require every bit of strength I still have, which isn’t much. I can just about afford to get it proof-read, but I can’t afford an editor to sort out my mangled grammar and make the thing vaguely coherent. With that in mind, and given I plainly don’t have the literary skills of Katy Price and Geri Horner née Halliwell, getting a publisher will be impossible. Instead, I’ll self-publish on Amazon in the full knowledge that what I have written is not very good (to say the least). “Roll up, roll up:  pay the best part of a tenner for something largely unreadable”. What a sales pitch.

My long-suffering partner has suggested a write a list of things to look forward to and she may be onto something. In no particular order, they include:

• A holiday in the Greek island of Paxos
• A holiday in Lanzarote
• A weekend somewhere in a log cabin
• Playing golf somewhere nice, like Dawlish Warren or preferably Bridport and West Dorset Golf Club
• Go to the Ribblehead viaduct again
• Read the library of books I have accumulated
• Meet up with my best friends for drinks
• Go to a railway diesel gala (Severn Valley Railway)

And above every other single thing in the world:

• Get an autism/ADHD/bipolar/PTSD assessment before I die (the NHS waiting lists suggest I won’t)

Jesus. There are actually things to look forward to, possibly.  There might even be a new Donald Fagen album in 2022 or I might see Courtney Barnett in concert.

I almost feel enthusiastic now. Fired up, ready to change the world. Well, my world.

Actually, my main resolution is to still be here on this Earth in a year’s time. Even though my depression is never ending, life is still better than the alternative. Not everyone I know who has been there is able to tell that tale.

Finally, for those of you doing Dry January, I’ll raise a large glass of Aussie Viognier tonight just for you. Each to their own and all that.