I think I have forgotten to say Happy New Year.
Better late than never.
Happy New Year.
There, that is done. It is an especially auspicious year, because in a very few weeks, on the fourth of February, actually, it will be the tenth anniversary of these pages. I will have written a very lot of diaries. I will have written approximately – very approximately – 1,800,000 words. Rather more than that, actually, because I have estimated on the low side, but definitely a very, very lot.
To those of you who have read most of them, congratulations. You have a determination and a tolerance for trivia that far outshines the average. I would like to promise that I will get to the denouement eventually, but probably I won’t. It is likely to be more of the same.
Other than calculating my verbosity, I have not come up with very much in the way of resolution for the New Year. I have avoided this because I have come to realise that keeping one’s resolutions is almost rather worse than failing to keep them. After getting stuck with the wretched chore of daily bathroom cleaning I would not wish anything else as ghastly upon myself, or on Mark, who gets stuck with it when he is at home as well, although between ourselves he is not very enthusiastic about it and sometimes I have to point out the bits that he has missed.
I am trying to dream up some hopes and plans for the New Year so that I will have something to tell you about, but I can’t. Everything I have thought of that I might like to do is hopelessly unaffordable, and therefore not worth thinking about again. Probably I had better make my New Year’s Resolution to be Earn Some More Cash.
I am, of course, working on that one already. I am out on the taxi rank tonight, where to my surprise I have actually had a couple of customers. Usually in January nobody goes anywhere, because of vile weather and credit card bills.
The weather is not vile at the moment. It is cold and clear, the ground busily freezing hard in order to be suitably solid and slippery for when the snow turns up at weekend. It has become so cold that we have had to move the poopies out of the conservatory and back into the kitchen, where there is no longer a Poopy Corral, and life has become one long parade of mopping up accidents. I put some puppy pads down in the hope that they might wee on those, but they all jumped on them in a frenzy of excitement, galloped triumphantly around the kitchen with them as if they were the enemy standard on the battlefield, and then tore them to shreds in a very exciting puppy-tugging game.
The resulting mess was worse than if they had all drunk six pints and then had an accident all at the same moment.
I am not going to bother with those again.
There is just me and Oliver in the house at the moment. Mark has gone to Lucy’s, where he and Jack are going to remove the engine from Lucy’s car and then rebuild it. I am sure they will have a very lovely time but felt no interest in joining them.
Lucy, fortunately, will be at work.
Oliver and I went to try and get his bicycle wheel repaired to take back to Bath, where he uses his bicycle all the time. We should have done this ages ago, but forgot all about it, and now we are at the last minute it is a minor crisis. With any luck we will be able to get it done before he has got to dash off.
He goes on Sunday.
Then there will be just one.
