Hello there, and welcome to another year of Blog Idle.
What 2015 holds for me and this blog is yet to be revealed but I think it likely that there will be a healthy amount of smut, several minor catastrophes, some mild staining, and more eyerolling than is strictly necessary. Any promises I might make as to the quality of bloggish output for this year would likely be a lie so let’s just say I’ll do my very best to be interesting and leave it at that.
And so another year begins.
And we are new and fresh and invigorated from two weeks of relentless family-time and merry “hijinks” that may or may not have included hosting Christmas dinner, a DIY project, and an incredibly whiny teething 1 year-old.
Ah, I’M SO VERY RELAXED.
But somehow the very act of passively travelling through time and entering a new year does make lots of people very interested in starting afresh. This is the year they’ll get fit. This is the year they’ll stop using the “pash and dash”* as their main method of romantic interaction. This is the year they’ll start paying attention to their cuticles, poor neglected wee things.
It probably won’t surprise you to know that I am largely immune to such new year shenanigans. In the past I’ve gone as far as just making imaginary resolutions since they have the benefit of being really impressive while also not happening as opposed to real ones which are dull and close enough to fictional as makes no difference.
But though I feel no real desire to lie to myself about the amount of exercise I’ll likely be getting this year, there are still a couple of things that I really do want to achieve in 2015. Prepare to be inspired, dear reader.
The first is to finally get my own website up and running. Speaking as someone who has spent the last few years doing nowt but working with and on websites it’s a bit pathetic that I still haven’t created a lair on the Internet for my own nefarious purposes. Ye, sayeth I, if Grumpy cat can haveth its own movie, then the least I can manage is something on WordPress. Let it be done.
The other and in some ways much more satisfying thing that I hope to achieve this year is to completely remove superfluous loops from my life.
Yes, loops.
I’m not sure exactly when it started, but nowdays every item of clothing I buy comes with a loop at each shoulder to prevent the garment from coming adrift from its hanger. Some loops are long, some are short and most are made of ribbon or sometimes a weird see-through rubbery elastic stuff. Invariably these tiny nooses end up hanging out a sleevehole or poking out of a neckline, and on rare occasions I’ve become hooked on doorhandles because of them. They are, like elevator music or the neighbour’s barking dog, a mild but constant annoyance.
But hey, don’t get me wrong, I am not anti-loopist. I’m not against the loops per se. They have a reason for existing and they fulfill that purpose very well in the busy retail environment however most of my clothes sit nicely on hangers without falling off and many others don’t live on hangers at all. I mean, who would even do that to knitwear? Are we barbarians? Indeed, we are not.
And yet I never seem to get around to cutting any of these redundant loops off my clothing. Every time I see one poking out I think “I must cut that off” and then by the time I’m near a pair of scissors I’ve forgotten about it. No more. I’ve started snipping the buggers off and IT FEELS SO GOOOOOOD. Honestly, it’s like the garment equivalent of popping bubblewrap, or, for the librarians amongst you, smacking a great big “CANCELLED” stamp on the flyleaf of a weeded library book.
There’s no new year’s resolution so easy to keep to as the one you actually enjoy. Here’s to a loop-free life, y’all! *quaffs champagne*
Let’s hear it for the guilt-free, achieveable resolutions for 2015. Got any?
*Or maybe it’s the year you just stop using the word “pash”.
Originally published on Stuff, 7/01/2015