2008 and all that

Oakley, who like Mr Dick is wise in all things, saved me from myself by pointing out that I was spending a disproportionate amount of time contributing opinions of dubious value on a website read by literally tens of people. This has to be the answer, a website bereft of far finer minds relegating me to the intellectual cheap seats, read by literally no one! A sound basis for a filing cabinet in which to store various musings and memories that I can harvest and publish when the subject is no longer actionable.

When better to start than a New Year's Day? Funny old days, New Year's; All is quiet on New Year's Day? My arse. It's a mixture of optimism and regret, for me, leastways. The optimism is just the human condition that stops most of us jumping off the Humber Bridge. The regret is the shame of needing to resolve. Resolve, apart from being my saviour on the second-most monumental of hangovers of my interesting life, for me at least has a very short half-life. Half-lives are interesting to me, probably the only thing I understood about nuclear stuff, isotopes and that, and the half-life of a resolution is probably about a week. Then I am only trying half as hard.

However, I use the term half-life advisedly, because the idea is never lost from memory, however crowded it has become by all those other ideas. Why, I remember last year's so perfectly that I actioned it as recently as November. It was a two-parter, Get Organised and Stay Organised. The banner scattered across the top of these jottings has self-evidently stayed with me for what must be fast approaching 35 years; Gregory is cheerful and disorganised - I've worn it like an ASBO, a badge of honour of hedonism and unruliness.

It was my fourth form (add 6, young people, to get to your 'grade' equivalent) teacher David Trenow who wrote this simple epithet in my school report, nothing more, just those concentrated five words that let me understand myself and tell me it was OK to be me. Not a whiff of reproach or disapproval, more constructive criticism - that's the way I took it and still do.

Ah, but within the self-satisfaction of accepting that statement as positive, it is tempting to believe that one is not possible without the other, the yin of cheerfulness can only exist with the yang of disorganisation. I think it's fair to say that I have found organised people to have, well, constrained ability for cheer.

So how have I managed to survive since in a world run by organised people? The answer is by falling short, epically. My greatest downfall has been timekeeping. My relationship with time has been significantly affected by tide tables. The preposition of a tide table is that it tells you what time high tide and low tide will be. There's plenty of guff about variation in tide heights, atmospheric pressure, wind strength and direction and all that, but very little about variation in tide times, and my experience has been that the tide sods off out again when it feels like it.

There must have been at least a dozen occasions during my life when I have been on time, maybe twice when I was early. What a horrible waste of life being early is! And of those times I have been on time, nothing wonderful or mythical happened. Rather the opposite, someone else didn't turn up on time, or whatever, and the occasion was delayed, reinforcing my belief that I should have been late as usual.

I will, however finish with an admission; despite a toe-curlingly good memory for embarrassing others, my corrupted hard disc can only retain record times for journeys, and thus my plain surprise at turning up half a day late in Exeter, failing to remember that the journey time allocated was in fact achieved many years before, in the middle of the night before speeding was a punishable crime.

So ends this start of this year's resolution, to write stuff down, with hope for a long half-life.