NEW Year resolutions are just futile and ridiculous. What is the point of me trying to lose weight, doing something meaningful to reduce my carbon footprint or remembering to wear clean pants every day if I know I will give up and lose interest after just three days of hunger, sore feet and a fortune spent on washing powder?
I mean, we don’t even know what year it is. Should we say twenty ten, like we did for nineteen seventy in the last century? Or two thousand and ten? Or, more correctly, two thousands and ten? Or two ten? Or two oh one oh?
Uh-uh, not that one. Sounds like the title of a rubbish American TV series. Fair enough. Even the BBC’s uniform pronunciation people don’t have a policy on what to say. They can’t even agree among themselves.
Not only do we not know what year it is but we have also lost track of what time of year it is. Last week, the supermarkets began selling Easter eggs and daffodils. When I was in Glasgow in October, they were flogging Christmas trees in Bearsden. The world has gone mad.
Of course, chocolate eggs will sell in December. They could sell body parts if they were made of scrummy milk chocolate and a creamy fondant centre. But they would not be Easter body parts. Because it isn’t Easter.
Thankfully, we still have piles of ice and snow to remind us that it is the middle of winter. Having rescued an old cailleach who went flying down New Street in Stornoway on her backside last week, I went looking for coarse salt to treat the pavements myself. Oisean’s was shut and coming out of the Crofters after another vain inquiry I too slipped and bruised the base of my spine.
Sadly, I can’t sue Lewis Crofters Ltd because Mrs X is being silly about recording the evidence.
“I don’t care how sore it is,” she screamed. “I am not taking photos of your coccyx. Some things I will not do.”
Still, these weeks of permafrost just now will remind us the Scottish Government froze our council tax as another populist move which left us with no protection when Jack Frost came calling. Local authorities with no cash to grit our roads or pavements. Nice one, SNP.
Whether they can afford the legal insurance after the payouts to everyone who fell and fractured their fibulas and femurs in the last fortnight by falling on untreated pavements, even here on Lewis, is another question altogether.
However, as we apply more ointment to our government-inflicted injuries, there is always a goodly measure of uplifting news at the turn of the year.
Like hospitals announcing their first babies. Even the old grump Van Morrison has had a sprog. Aw. His “manager”, a pretty young thing called Gigi is the mother.
Van the grumpy man
Ah, those old superstars of the 1960s. Will she still knead him, will she still bleed him, when he’s 64? Obviously yes. Except no. Because she doesn’t exist and neither does the papoose. The arch-grump says his website was hacked. And his publicist who confirmed the story to the media says he got the “facts” from the website.
George Ivan Morrison, it transpires, is too dour to talk to his own publicist. They communicate via a website. Having had first-hand experience of vainly trying to get a few facts from Morrison before he came up to Stornoway in 2005, I do sympathise. But not with Van the Cantankerous Man who may not, in fact, be as virile as we were led to believe.
I have not made any predictions for 2010 yet. It is such a dodgy business. Last summer, after meeting former work and pensions secretary James Purnell, I confidently foretold he would be the next prime minister. So sure was I of this I suggested if he was not Gordon Gruamach’s successor I would run naked through Stornoway. Six weeks later, Purnell resigned from the Cabinet.
Happily for me, people had either forgotten my pledge or just had no desire at all to see me carrying out my forfeit. I wonder which it was.
This however is the time of year when we sit down and assess what has gone right and what we have made an absolute pig’s ear of. If I was going to make a resolution, which I am not, it would be to warn my dear, impressionable readers about the dangers of casual hanky-panky. It is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Beware the one-night stand. It can go badly wrong. I had one 14 years ago and the bit of stuff I picked up is still here.
Having got used to having her round the place, I am now beginning to despair in case she is about to take off again. Could this be the year she swaps me for a younger stud?
Shopping with her the other day, out of the corner of my eye I noticed she was whispering to one of those glitzy sales ladies in Superdrug.
They were both looking at me out of the corners of their eyes. I reached down because I thought I was flying low. All guys do when that happens. After the ladies simultaneously glanced at me they both collapsed into fits of giggles. Oh oh, something was going on.
When Mrs X stopped to gossip to someone else, I asked the assistant what was so funny as my wife had only said she was going to ask about hair conditioner.
The glamourpuss tossed her yard of blonde hair out of her eyes and over her shoulder and claimed she was only doing her job. She maintained, as it was the start of a new year, she was doling out advice to ladies who need to make certain changes.
“I tell them to say goodbye to dull and limp and hullo to a new and exciting bounce.”
Oh heck. Now I’m really worried.
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