James Proclaims!

Like most of its predecessors, 2024 is a year. Whether it is a good year or a bad year (or a blameless measurement of time passing) is yet to be determined but it has now made a start. And when a year starts, it is important that we all take some time to reflect on just how disappointing we are as people and make some kind of pledge to be better in the future. It’s a very narrow window in which to commit to self-improvement. You can’t just wake up on January 2nd and decide to make positive life changes – that would never work. It must be done on the first day of the year, or not at all. I don’t make the rules, but I damn well will abide by them!

In previous years I perhaps haven’t taken the concept of the New Year’s Resolution as seriously as I should, and you could accuse me of having set some rather insincere targets on my New Year’s Day post. Regular readers may recall that one year I became a little fixated with the 1996 film Space Jam despite having never seen it. In 2023 I did manage to right this wrong and watched not only the original Space Jam movie, but the 2021 sequel, Space Jam: A New Legacy. I neither loved nor hated them.

Last year I made the somewhat strange decision to make some real New Year’s Resolutions, which seems very out of character. Having reviewed them prior to writing this post, I can see that I absolutely failed to hit all but one of them. They were as follows:

1. Lose some weight
2. Write more
3. Keep fit
4. Spend less money
5. Enjoy the moment

The only one I did achieve was the goal of ‘keeping fit’. Which was fairly easy seeing as I had already managed to get quite fit during the pandemic. Keeping fit is much more manageable than getting fit in the first place. Plus regular exercise always seems like a legitimate escape from my children a few times a week. I love my children but sometimes I need a break from them. Running around a field might seem like a strange way of getting some ‘me time’ but there’s only so much Paw Patrol anyone can endure.

Unfortunately I also use exercise as a way of legitimising my poor dietary choices so it’s not surprising that I didn’t achieve the ‘losing weight’ goal.

The lack of posts on this blog is a fair indication that I didn’t maintain any kind of writing commitment, and I’m quite certain that I did nothing to reduce my spending, although a hike in the cost of living possibly made that all but impossible anyway.

I did, arguably ‘enjoy some moments’ of 2023, but I don’t think I achieved anything like the sentiment of that resolution and still spent far too much time worrying about stuff outside of my control.

It would be reasonable to just ‘roll over’ last years resolutions to this year, but I’m not going to do that on the basis that:

1. It’s not especially nice to fail at stuff
2. I didn’t actually remember making any of the resolutions until I started writing this post, so any success would have been more down to the fact that I wanted to achieve those things anyway, rather than because I made New Year’s Resolutions.

I think, therefore, an insincere list of stupid goals is probably more ‘me’. So these are my resolutions for 2024:

1. Wear odd shoes to work. Ultimately very similar but slightly different shoes on each foot. Just to see if anyone notices.
2. Start watching a sport I previously had no interest in. And then become boringly knowledgeable about the sport, including historic fixtures which predate my interest in said sport. Then annoy people who really are fans of the sport by constantly sharing my insights with them.
3. Coin a new phrase and then use it relentlessly until it is adopted by at least one other person. I don’t wish to let the sock out of the laundry basket, but I may even attempt that on this blog at some point.
4. Give up a foodstuff which has no negative health implications and then brag about the fact to anyone who will listen, in the hope of influencing other people to make similarly pointless lifestyle changes.
5. Read the chapters of a novel in random order to see if I can still make sense of the plot. And then make the spurious claim that I enjoyed it more than if I’d read the novel in the correct order and see if I can turn ‘reading stuff in the wrong order’ into a social media fad.

There we go. Some pointless resolutions for 2024. I think we all feel better about the future now.