James Proclaims!

And so ends 2024.

And what a year it has been.

A quick perusal of various news sites suggests quite a lot of stuff has happened this year. As someone who has been alive and fairly conscious for much of the year, I expect I should already have known that.

I attempt to write a sort of retrospective (of the year that was) on December 31st every year. However, when I sit down to write them, I seem to have quite a lot of difficulty in recalling anything that has actually happened.

I have increasingly put this down to the fact that my existence is dominated by the machinations of two small children. They are my children. I am their father. As such I am obliged to spend a lot of time with them. I quite like spending time with them, but my awareness of anything else that is happening has been severely compromised.

I know there have been some quite big elections. I definitely voted in at least one of them. That was the one that happened in the UK. I am not allowed to vote in the elections that happen outside of the UK. But I am still aware that they happen. Before I had children I used to care quite a lot about stuff like elections. On some level I still do care, but there isn’t really time to process anything of any significance between swimming lessons, soft play and supermarkets (dragging my offspring around a supermarket being a fairly regular activity that both of my children find weirdly entertaining and I find nothing short of torturous).

Aside from elections, I think there has been quite a lot of war in 2024. Then again, war seems to have been an ever-present in the news for a few years so I’m not sure 2024 deserves to be singled-out for being a particularly war-laden year.

Outside of politics and war, there has definitely been some sport. I remember following the Olympics fairly avidly and prior to that I was reasonably transfixed by Euro 2024, which, as I recall, was a football tournament. There was other sport too. It was a particularly bad year for the Welsh rugby team, who failed to win a single game. As a longstanding fan of Welsh rugby, I have been subject to some dismal runs of form in the past (most of the 1990s being notably poor) but I’ve never witnessed the team manage to lose every game of a calendar year even during the darkest of previous eras. Fortunately the kids have kept me too busy to be able to watch many of the games so I have been spared much of the agony of witnessing the decline of a once great team. Ok, never really a great team in truth, but a fairly goodish one in happier times.

In terms of popular culture, 2024 saw the renaissance of one of my favourite bands. Unfortunately it turns out that Oasis are the favourite band of quite a lot of other people so getting a ticket to see them in 2025 proved to be quite challenging. Indeed I had all but given up hope having failed to secure one when they first went on sale. But then, through a slightly obsessive revisiting of the Ticketmaster website over the next three months, I did get one at (a still fairly hefty) face value. So I will see them in 2025. Which I’m quite happy about. I did see Liam Gallagher in 2024 for free, thanks to my volunteering at the Reading Festival where he was headlining. The extortionate price I paid for my Oasis ticket probably balances the economics of that endeavour but whether the price of the ticket is worth it or not (and it probably is not) my obsession with Oasis started when I was 15, and no amount of logic is going to overcome my inner teenager, who is as belligerent and single-minded as he was when I was him all of the time.

On a personal level, while 2024 has mainly been dominated by my children, there have been other things on my mind. I did sort of win an award for being alright at my job, which still seems weird to write about. It definitely did happen and I’ve got the press cutting (the one in which the journalist got my name wrong) to prove it.

Mainly though, 2024 seems to have been the year that my house declared war on me. After 11 years of neglect, Proclaims Towers has decided that enough is enough. Most years since I moved in have seen some sort of domestic emergency, in the form of leaky plumbing, defective boilers or recurring black mould. 2024 has seen an increase in hostilities though, and in the past twelve months, we’ve had to deal with a burst pipe (which I managed to fix myself), a major electrical problem (which I didn’t) and water coming into the house through the roof (which probably caused the major electrical problem). As I write there is still scaffolding outside, from the recent repairs carried out by a roofer. He has, alas, only rectified about half of the problems and the scaffolding will need to be moved from the front of the house to the back in 2025 for the rest of the work to be completed. The electricity is functioning again, but we did have a week in October when most of our power sockets were out of action, after a previously dormant outlet hidden behind a radiator started spitting lightening bolts at us, which was both a ridiculous and a terrifying experience to live through.

By Christmas morning, scaffolding aside, we did think that most of our domestic woes were behind us, after a fairly alarming and expensive few months. But Chez Proclaims had one last surprise in store. An area of carpet, which covered a broken floorboard in our living room, (a floorboard that had been broken for the entire 11 years we have lived here and had previously caused us no problems) gave way as Mrs Proclaims stepped on it. Watching their mother being partially eaten by the carpet on Christmas Day is a horrifying memory that may cause my children nightmares for many months and years to come. Fortunately Mrs Proclaims was not badly hurt and was able to climb of the hole in our living room floor. But we did still have a hole in our living room floor.

So I have had to add amateur carpentry to my amateur plumbing skills and have effected a repair, which is less than satisfactory but which does now mean that we don’t have a hole in our living room floor.

I shall leave predictions for 2025 until tomorrow. But my house can expect a response next year. I will have my revenge. And hopefully make the place a little bit nicer to live in while I’m at it. But revenge will be the driving force.

Anyway, whatever else can be levelled at it, what cannot be denied is that 2024 was a period of time that can be defined as a year. And as it was 366 days long, it contributed more than its fair share as far as that is concerned.

2025, with its paltry 365 day offering, is already looking like a bit of a letdown in comparison.