New Year’s resolutions:
1. No more TV IQ tests that expose one’s innumeracies and estimate one’s intelligence at somewhere between a One Nation voter and a newt.
2. No more Big Brother, Survivor, Wild On, or suchlike fooleries, on doctor’s orders.
3. Ration Passions to one viewing a month; won’t miss anything of the plot at all, since it takes weeks for one day to elapse in their timewarp.
4. Take up another hobby using whatever fingers left from the leadlighting class.
5. Discontinue pottery because of family’s cruel remarks and wimpish complaints about clay in the kitchen sink.
6. Take up smoking.
The last is possibly surprising for some readers, and I may or may not do this—but I am feeling quite sorry for smokers at the moment, pariahed and exiled, sneaking furtive drags in the roaring gales or stinging sun outside restaurants, workplaces and even pubs. There are hard, clever people around who’d like to make fags so expensive (even illegal) that they might become as attractive as all the other illegal drugs and form another useful income stream for criminals. In my teaching days, I always gravitated to the smokers’ staffroom (in the days when they had such things) because they laughed more and swore more and tended to be members of the union. Non-smokers weren’t always wowsers, and included wonderful, even ordinary folk, but one thing you could bet the hedge fund on was that whatever wowsers there were on staff wouldn’t be found in the smokers’ staffroom. Perhaps, since so many of my loved ones are nicotine slaves, I have finally become corrupted by the passive smoke: I love the smell of a cigar or pipe. Remember that immortal line from Black Books?
Huffy customer: Do you realise I’m breathing all your cigarette smoke?
Bernard: Don’t worry about it: just buy me a drink some time.
Now there’s a series that would bear repeating.
Anyway, if you’re trying to give up something, try giving up the telly. The happiest winter of my entire life, as I think I have probably told you before, was when the boys were 12 and six respectively and we turned off the TV and read The Lord of the Rings aloud to each other. Some of their pals found out and would come round and listen too. Long car rides became sunny times of wonder, school holidays full of fierce paper sword fights and detailed map-making. The very memory of it has moved me to create the