Happy New Year

It’s New year’s Eve and, once again, a time of traditions.  Traditions have changed over the years.  Once, you may have gone out to a pub, or to a succession of pubs, before pubs started ticketing people to allow them entrance to a public house, thereby sucking much of the joy out of a pub crawl in exchange for providing a sandwich platter of the sort more usually encountered at the more desperate kind of civic function, or siege.  Pub crawls on a New Year’s Eve have a special tension all of their own, as the perennial pub crawl dilemma of ‘should I stay put?  We have a table and the place is OKish.  But maybe we could be having a better time somewhere else?’ (a dilemma solved on all such occasions by having one more beer and then taking the decision) is amplified by the social pressure of starting New Year’s Eve by having a good time.  Having a good time is mandatory on New Year’s Eve, with a societal expectation of euphoria when the clock strikes midnight.

As New Year follows New Year, you might decide to go to small social gatherings on NYE, or to an organised event.  This will probably be at a golf club and will involve fireworks at midnight.  This is tremendous fun, even if you don’t get to let off the fireworks, drunk, yourself.  And they will restrain you if you try.

There will probably come a time when you have your first NYE either on your own or with your significant other, just the two of you together.  This is what ‘Hootenanny’ was invented for and why it keeps on being broadcast, year after sodding year.  Of course the best way to enjoy ‘Hootenanny’ is to open the first bottle early, send everyone you know a text about 10:30pm wishing them all the very best for the New Year, then go to bed.  Stir briefly about midnight when various neighbours and golf clubs set off their fireworks, drunk, then wake up in a new year.  Perfect.

Some people make resolutions for the new year and if you are the sort of person who needs to make a change to their life to improve it based on advice you read in a magazine with a glossy front cover showing somebody with improbably white teeth looking toned, then 1 January is probably a good time to start doing something, like going to the gym, or stop doing something, like eating the huge amounts of cheese and chocolate that have been a glorious eature of your diet since Christmas Eve.

In the spirit of making changes, it’s time to make a change to this blog.

Recently, the blog has comprised of two entries a week for most weeks, those entries being 700 words long.  This was largely, well, wholly, an experiment in determining if I could crank out the quantity of material that appears, on a regular basis, in the printed media, the sort of thing that this blog frequently takes aim at, with a trebuchet full of flaming badger shit.

This has led to a couple of conclusions.

The first is that 700 words is not enough to explore a subject.  That’s why many recent entries are just starting to get going when they stop.

One needs time to warm up to a full on rant, when the swearing come hot and fast and the indignation seethes from every phrase.

The other noticeable thing about this blog is that nobody reads it.  It’s all very well carefully crafting sly sentences for your own amusement, but this is too akin to mental masturbation, or the sort of behaviour that might be affected by a ‘talented’ ‘musician’ who has a keyboard, GarageBand and an awful lot of his compositions on CDs that he makes for himself and keeps on a special shelf in his bedroom.  In his mum’s house.

So, in 2015 G&P will go quarterly.  G&PQ sounds more like a company that operates ferries than a glossy magazine, so no scope for confusion in the Google results, and I am rather taken with the idea of the longer form blog entry.

Happy New Year everyone.