Sacrifice a chicken at the shrine to Janus.

Five days into this shiny New Year already and here we are looking both ways down the road we’re travelling. Our blessed change in recent fortunes dictates that we are eagerly looking forward to the coming months, and anticipating grand boatily progress. Already 2006 is tinged with the warm afterglow of nostalgia and we bathe in its strange fuzzy radiance and we are so, so proud of how far we’ve come. Or alternatively Yuk, scratch that, pull the other one and change the bleedin’ record- it’s taken effing ages of banging our bloody heads against the hull to persuade the Wendy project into anything resembling a glacial sodding crawl. That’s better.

This time a year ago, or at least last New Years Eve things went with a distinct phut rather than a bang, we scared ourselves sober at Victoria’s house in Nottingham by attempting our accounts in the early evening, thus discovering just in time that we were about to scrape along the bottom into January- never mind the other eleven months… By the time B’s sister finished her shift and finally joined us for one of those silly arbitrary new year drinks at 2am we were either too whack tired or just plain weirded out to indulge at all. Cor, we must’ve been fabulous fun to be with.
Whilst on it’s way to the recycling the old calendar tells me that we didn’t take many weekends at all off last year considering the need to find time to (amongst other things) attend to the following:
a) Being Really Knackered,
b) A Family Wedding and Birthday,
c) good old Back Injury,
d) Two Days on the Isle of Wight,
e) Going Mad,
f) Cheering up,
g) passing a Driving Test,
h) Nearly Killing Each Other, and
i) Getting back Together Again
Christ, now that I look at it it’s a wonder we got anything done at all.
I do feel quite painfully conscious of the knowledge that we basically spent all of last year removing paint and rust by one means or another (by either rubbing vigorously, or with lots of bashing). Looking at the photo album I’m starting to see a common theme running through recent pages, one of various people dressed like a bizarre hybrid of tellytubbies and stormtroopers, all toting various unpleasant powertools. That’s it, children’s TV will just never be the same for me again.
At this point it might be fun to consider the odd notion that maybe up till now we’ve sort of had it easy and that, in order to be successful, the coming year must present more challenges, intrigues and financial implications far above and beyond anything we’ve so far encountered.
What ho, we’re really looking forward to it anyway and have duly raised our glasses of very cheapest cava, for unlike last year, there now for the first time ever, lurks in the shadows S and B’s Big Plan (see also Good Grief, or Project Management) and the way we’ve laid it out before long it’ll most likely be growling and snapping at our heels. For we are nothing if not Ambitious, and a year of Weekends is not a very long time at all.