Generally, having always been a bit of a fun-seeker, I’m inclined to read the “New Year – New You” lists with a smirk and a sneer. These gently introduced small changes have replaced the more gung-ho New Years’ resolutions I grew up with back in the tough old 20th century, which are probably too “aggressive” for these tender times: WRITE NOVEL, STOP SMOKING, GET RICH OR DIE TRYING.
Though pleasingly stark and straightforward, they too were rather hard to take seriously. If I’ve learned anything from 65 years of being on this planet, it’s that uttering the words “I’m never going to (insert pet vice here) again” make one look about as worldly as Tom Kitten, because nine out of 10 times you will, and your words will come back to haunt you, making your defeat all the more poignant.
But this year, facing not just a year but a future in which it is likely that I will no longer have the use of my legs, I find my attitude to those ever-hopeful lists somewhat altered.
At best, I find them bittersweet; I loved my old life so much, and presumed that it would stay that way forever. Why didn’t I keep a gratitude journal? (Except I did, in real time, making the most enormous fuss of the people I loved to quite a weird degree, treating them like my own special VIPs.)
Why didn’t I cold-water swim? (Except I did, in the filthy Brighton sea, where I’ve become such a native that last year I was one day “cheek-by-jowl” there with a dead seagull who was festooned with, presumably used, condoms – or rather I would have been had the dear creature not been headless. I didn’t turn a hair, I loved sea-swimming that much.)
Why didn’t I take time to nurture my primary relationship? (Except I did, on that dirty beach by that dirty sea, when after a rocky time my husband of three decades and I got to love each other again. “Let’s swim out to the safety buoy – live dangerously!” I said to Mr Raven during our final dip of the summer; we got there, kissed and swam back to the shore. I’ll probably never swim in that or any other sea again – but the memories of how enchanted we were with each other on our post-beach bar crawls have somehow swept away the bad stuff.)
However, at worst, I find the softly-softly “New Year – New You” lists maddening. I’ve always found newspapers who patronise their readers quite revolting – especially considering the extremely messy manner in which we hacks live our lives – and to read the nth chirpy jackass suggesting that we “walk upstairs instead of using the lift”, “stand on one leg while brushing your teeth” and, major ick ahead, “hop”, makes me feel like committing mayhem.
I suppose it’s what I see as the banality, the lack of grounding in the real beauty and brutality of life, which makes me so cross with the latter lot. My view of living – always robust, to say the least – has been coarsened immeasurably by becoming disabled.
The matter-of-factness of the wonderful nurses and my own natural shamelessness have combined to create an incontinent monster who, lifelong unplagued by “women’s troubles” ever since the teenage years (when my mother dubbed me “The Camel” due to my ability to retain water) is belatedly wise in the language of the whole kit and caboodle of the untrammelled self: catheters, suppositories, nappies – and don’t even ask about “manual excavation”.
With this has come the knowledge that just as many of us are a few pay cheques away from homelessness, so are we just a bit of “bad luck” (as one doctor described my spinal abscess to me) away from reverting to the state of helpless babyhood. It’s probably the biggest lesson I’ve ever learned.
But let’s not leave things on a sombre note. Let me, for a moment, offer my own banal “New Year – New You” observation by reminding you how glorious the joy of movement is. You bipeds seem so wondrous to me now, in your elegant, casual, striding grace, like great flocks of faerie folk – “Walkerines” perhaps. Come to think of it, I love imagining you walking up flights of stairs, standing on one leg – but please, no hopping over the age of 10.
And as I’ve also noticed that lots of the current lists encourage us to read a poem a day to elevate our inner selves, I’d like to offer this one by John Dryden, which has been on my mind ever since my bit of bad luck. Here’s to 2025, whether it holds a New You or not. I’m sure the old one is fine.
“Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.”
