Tag archives for films

I’ve been think­ing about New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions. And in a way, it’s a kind of tri­umph, because it’s June. It’s June, and my New Year’s Res­o­lu­tion for this year is still relevant.

New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions are basi­cally an oppor­tu­nity to live out your very own ver­sion of ‘It’s a Won­der­ful Life’.

In that Christ­mas movie, James Stewart’s char­ac­ter is sui­ci­dal about the way his life is going, so an angel called Clarence shows him what life would have been like if he sim­ply hadn’t been born.

Every­thing it turns out, would have been ter­ri­ble. All the pos­i­tive influ­ence he has had on peo­ple would never have existed, and all his friends and fam­ily would have had trag­i­cally unful­filled lives — or would in one case have actu­ally died. James Stew­art realises life has been worth liv­ing after all, and becomes happy. Noto­ri­ously happy. Every­one invari­ably bursts into tears at the end of the movie because he’s so happy.

My the­ory is, when you adopt a New Year’s Res­o­lu­tion, you basi­cally cre­ate a ‘new, improved’ you. A you that is specif­i­cally designed to have a pos­i­tive influ­ence in life. And so, a few months down the line, it’s pos­si­ble to have your own Clarence moment and deter­mine what life would have been like if the ‘new, improved’ you had never existed.

My res­o­lu­tion for 2012 was to make bet­ter use of my time. Much like every­one, there are a lot of things I want to do, or even need to do, but which I don’t really have to do. 2012 was the year where I was just going to do them.

So:

• Because I got up every work­ing day (well, most days) and did two hours (well, nearly two hours) of writ­ing, my book is fin­ished (well, nearly finished).
• Because I bought and installed a new han­dle and lock on the front door, I no longer have to insert the dead­lock key and use it as a makeshift han­dle to shut the door.
• Because I bought boxes, I’ve man­aged to make a start on sort­ing the loft out.
• Because I phoned a builder, I now have a quote to replace two slates that had fallen from the roof.
• Because I took the plunge and tiled the bath­room, I now have a lovely bath­room in which to ablute, and I can tile!

So, if you tally the num­ber of jobs that I’ve man­aged to tackle since the new year, I think that counts as one of the more suc­cess­ful resolutions.

I am so happy you should be crying.

But wait, wait.

I’ve gone too far. I’ve dis­cov­ered that, after the cred­its roll, and every­one in the cin­ema is fil­ing out, and sniff­ing and pre­tend­ing to each other that they’ve got some­thing in their eye, those pos­i­tive devel­op­ments have not gone away.

Con­sider the bath­room tiling, one of my most sig­nif­i­cant achieve­ments this year:

• I now have a lovely new bathroom!
• But… the tiles looked so new and white they made the bath­room sink look old and knackered.
• So I had to buy a new sink.
• And new taps.
• And new bath taps.
• And new bath plughole.
• I had to learn how to fit a bath plughole.
• I had to stand anx­iously in the kitchen wait­ing for drips to come through the ceil­ing. They didn’t! Yet.
• I had to pur­chase a tile scorer.
• I had to learn how to score and cut tiles. I failed, repeatedly.
• I had to pur­chase elec­tric tile saw.
• I had to find a plumber to come and remove the shower and fit new sink.
• I had to get park­ing per­mits for plumber.
• I had to buy a new shower.
• I had to arrange for the plumber to come and fit new shower after tiling. This meant I needed to do the tiling to a stan­dard that a trades­man wouldn’t laugh at.
• I had to pay plumber’s park­ing fine after get­ting the wrong permit.

This list goes on, but I have cut it short for the sake of rel­a­tive brevity. The whole thing is, at any rate, wor­thy of a tear-inducing movie plot that I will prob­a­bly repeat end­lessly after a few drinks at Christmastime.

My point here is this: each act of won­der­ful­ness presents a whole series of new oppor­tu­ni­ties for enforced won­der­ful­ness until your whole life becomes a great whirl of insane wonderfulness.

There is a more stark exam­ple from my list:

• I now have a quote to replace two slates that had fallen from the roof!

But, in get­ting that quote the builder dis­cov­ered and demon­strated that the gable end of my house is top­pling over, and drag­ging the roof with it. If it falls dur­ing the night, it will crash through my neighbour’s roof, roughly around the loca­tion of his pillow.

Since when did a quick phonecall to a builder become a race to save my neighbour’s life?

Per­haps in another six months Clarence will be joy­fully claim­ing that if I hadn’t made that New Year’s Res­o­lu­tion, I might have been car­ry­ing the bur­den of guilt of hav­ing killed my neigh­bour and destroyed his house.

Did I men­tion that the life-saving works are going to require retil­ing the bathroom?

I’m feel­ing a bit teary now.