New Year. What a marvellous thing. Not because it’s an excuse to go out and party - I find all the forced jollity of new year’s eve rather false, especially after the excesses of the December parties - it’s a big build up to a moment in time that’s over a pico-second later (and which the pub always gets wrong, so noone’s quite sure when they should go mad kissing everyone). Of course, that’s precisely what happened last night, and we ended up marking it three times all told.

The ideal new year? Dinner with friends, somewhere miles and miles away. Four or six or eight of us in a nice house. A view out across the sea. Popping outside at midnight to drink in 2003 under the stars.

No. The reason new year is such a good thing is that it resets the counter, wipes the slate clean and gives you a chance to try again at the things you failed to do last year. It means that everything that was behind you is ahead of you once again. Another birthday, another Christmas, another Eurovision Song Contest, all to look forward to.

It’s also given me the ‘do it’ bug. Couldn’t bear the thought of starting the new year in a mess last night. Radio 1 was playing some fantastic music, so turned it up loud and scrubbed the kitchen from top to bottom before heading out to the pub. It positively glimmers.

This morning I spent four hours working on my photos, and this afternoon, after tea and cake and games of Rummikub with Viv and mum, I came home to make onion, pepper and sweetcorn soup to eat tonight in front of the brand new series of Sex in the City (another good thing about new year), I did two loads of washing and some washing machine maintenance, and grated the world’s largest block of cheddar until my hands got cramp.

I haven’t made resolutions. I could say I’ll go to the gym every day but (a) I know I won’t, (b) I’ll feel guilty if I say I will and I don’t and (c) it’s not good for you to go every day, which is the ideal excuse.

So, instead, I have a list of things I want (and intend) to do before 2004.

1. Travel to Russia, preferably on the train that runs from Paris to Moscow. Currently thinking end of March / beginning of April would be good for this one.

2. Sell some of my photos and/or have them shown somewhere.
3. Write my book (this one has been on the list for the last five years, so perhaps it should be downgraded to ‘make substantial progress on the book’).

There. Three jobs. Surely not too much to work at. It has to fit around the mag and the radio, though, and I want to spend more time working on my German, but we have 364 fresh, unwrapped days ahead of us and they deserve to be used well.

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