2006 and All That...

The French take New Year’s Eve very seriously. The food shops do a roaring business, especially the patisseries which offload huge quantities of creamy, chocolate log things with gold crowns on top. Surprisingly however French TV on New Year’s Eve is as awful as ours with can-can dancers and people in fancy dress. Bah, humbug!

BBC Prime (the general entertainment English language channel piped down the French satellite system) had a fairly good idea nonetheless. They replayed the very rousing 2005 Last Night of the Proms which kept the wife and I awake through both French and English (one hour later) New Years. The only difficulty was that the wife (reinforced by quantities of cherry brandy) tried vainly to out-sing the BBC chorus. Those of my readers who have heard the wife sing will know that her voice is one to bring the house down (literally).

And so to my resolutions for 2006:

First I intend to blog more frequently. My outpourings have been a little sporadic in recent months, so I am setting myself a target of 100 in the year. Not unreasonable when you think that some bloggers to do it three times a day (careful now, this could get silly).

Secondly I must reduce my waistline. Santa Claus has given me a rather odd contraption that you grip in both hands while digital figures (rather like a blood pressure machine) whirr away. After 60 seconds I have to hand the contraption to the daughter’s boyfriend who is the only member of our household smart enough to follow the instructions. He then adds in my height, my weight (yes, I lied), and after some careful analysis of the figures declares that I’m “obese”. Oddly almost everyone who has ever tried this thing gets the same answer, but I am going to pack the contraption away, eat less, drink less and take some exercise. Then in a few months I’ll try it again and see if I can achieve something less than “obese”.

Thirdly I want to do less work and, by doing so, make more money. It has often occurred to me that the harder I work the more money I seem to lose. So a more relaxed approach to 2006 should find me measurably better off. A round of golf, anyone?