About this blog
This is absolutely not about 2012 per se but about my take on the year. About the good and bad that happened to me, hopefully written in small little snippets.
I like a good snippet - don't you?
Anyway, as I say this is strictly one man's view point. My blog, my rules - ok?
Highlight of the year
The highlight of the year wasn't actually one particular moment but several linked moments which all added up to one big, big highlight. Massive.
Fr'instance - in June I arranged to meet a friend I'd known for years in London. We were stood on a jetty waiting for the riverbus thingie, the Thames Clipper, when it started spitting with rain. I did the Sir Galahad thing and took my anorak off and placed it around the shoulders of my companion and pulled the hood up to cover her hair.
And then I looked at this tiny little lady looking so, so vulnerable engulfed in my coat and my heart kind of melted . . .
I've been a very lucky boy and dated some really lovely ladies in my life. A very lucky boy indeed. But I always treasured the time I got to spend alone. I always hoped in my heart that one day I would meet someone who would turn that feeling over - that when I wasn't with them far from relishing being alone I would actually hate it. I would miss that someone special.
Later in the year I had spent a few wonderful days with this little lady, went to work and when I came home she was gone - back to her world, back to her work, etc. My house seemed empty and bereft of any life. I missed her so, so much. I knew then that I had really met that someone special. And that feeling was confirmed beyond any doubt when I discovered what was on my bed!
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| I'll keep you company until she gets back x |
That someone special is at work right now, hence I have time to write this. And I am missing them right now.
My highlight of the year has to be falling in love with Tania.
♪♪♪ Musical moments ♪♪♪
I liked a lot of what I heard this year - was smitten with the singing and songwriting of Emeli Sandé even if there seemed to be an overkill of her turning up at prestigious events towards the year's end.
But one piece of music lodged itself in my brain above all others.
But one piece of music lodged itself in my brain above all others.
Driving my car I'd become aware of a great song going on - but it was already halfway through and in my dreamy, other-worldly mindset I'd missed the intro, the title, the artist, everything. I became quite good at tunelessly singing the end of the song without never knowing how it started. Then gradually - across several weeks - I picked up on it earlier until - yay! - I finally learned to recognise its simplistic yet whimsical intro.
You know those songs that automatically make you lean across and turn up the volume a few notches?? Somebody That I Used To Know by Gotye became one of those - still is. I just never tire of hearing it - still smile inanely when I hear those first few notes that sound very like Baa Baa Blacksheep. Song of the year for me, no doubt about it.
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| Just Somebody That I Used To Know |
For reasons I won't trouble you with here I booked to go and see Rod Stewart in June 2013. Thought I had better listen to some of his old stuff and try to be a little bit knowledgeable!
I had forgotten just how good Young Turks was.
Is.
If you see me and it looks like I'm talking to myself I'll be singing this song.
Farewell fickle mistress
In the Spring of 2012 I watched the little low-loader truck drive away with my Mazda sports car on it and as I walked back indoors realised I had, in that moment, just lost five and a half thousand pounds. And I punched the air in delight!!
I had always wanted an MX5 and envisaged the delights of driving on sunny days with the top down, in some ways reliving the feelings I used to get when riding my motorbikes in a previous life. And I did indeed get to have my days of windswept hair. Driving it home from work with the top down certainly seemed to make my 35 mile commute less of an ordeal.
What I hadn't bargained for was its capricious behaviour during the winter. Four times the car spun on dead straight roads without any provocation from me, once at a ridiculous five miles per hour, once on a motorway when I missed the barriers my millimetres and good fortune alone.
.
I could have done without the cat that thought to head-butt the front of the car when it was travelling at 70+ mph - the car, not the cat - putting a large dent in the front apron. Or the huge crack which grew across the windscreen. Or the slashed roof after a mindless, moronic vandal decided to enjoy his version of fun.
I have never hated a car so much in all my life. To see the back of it as it was taken away was worth every penny of that five and half grand, believe me.
A Broad Abroad!
This bit has nothing to do with a woman in a foreign land - I just liked the title, that's all.
But it is to do with travelling abroad.
Three trips this year. Italy. Versailles. France.
The Italian trip included finally making it to Pisa, Florence and Rome plus some other stuff which I'll come to. Of those three cities I allowed one day for the Leaning Tower and then two days each for Florence and Rome.
I didn't even last one whole day in any of them. Man, I hated them all so much. Too busy, too crowded, too noisy, too full of people trying to make a buck, or a Euro I guess, out of tourist tat.
In the few hundred yards we walked from the nearest Metro station to the Vatican we were pestered literally every five or six yards by somebody trying to get us to take a guided tour.
Get me out of here!
But the rest of Italy was great.
I loved driving on the country roads from place to place.
The highlight beyond any doubt was making it to Coriano, the home town of the motorcycle racer, Marco Simoncelli who had been killed six months earlier in a freak accident in Malaysia.
At first we thought the town hadn't done anything to commemorate their boy but then we stumbled upon a site at the front of the church with flowers, a collection of photos from throughout his life, a banner that visitors could sign - and yes I did. It was just a tasteful spot to pay homage to a man who was destined to become a great racer and one of the sport's most charismatic men.
What impressed most was discovering that virtually the whole town was supporting the plan to build a memorial to the racer but not one of them was trying to make money for themselves out of it. We had come from Valentino Rossi's home town and there everyone was on the make - the contrast was stark.
They even thought to change the number of the local bus route to 58, Marco's racing number.
Ciao e grazie SuperSic . . .
The two weeks travelling through France in October with Tania were heavenly, discovering places I hadn't seen before, Albi, Briançon,etc and finally making it to Monaco for the first time since my childhood was a treat. I had promised myself I would drive around the roads used for the Grand Prix but it quickly became obvious that it would be a tortuous drive. Instead I walked the whole of the circuit and discovered it really is quite small - didn't take long at all. Can tick that off my to-do list.
Monaco is very up itself, though.
Another memorable moment was visiting Tania's childhood friend, Tonina and her husband Pino near Turin in Italy. Have you ever experienced that moment when sometimes in life you meet someone and you know instantly you have just become part of a really special friendship? So it was with this couple and their children. Lovely, lovely people. And aren't multilingual conversations the best ever! Ours swayed between English, Italian and French - sometimes in the one sentence.
Oops! I lied. As I was reviewing this I realised there had been a fourth trip this year - how could I forget? Five days in Tenerife in November. It's where Tania and I made a new friend . . .
It was on this trip that I heard my best joke of 2012 - but sadly it only works if you can say it - writing it won't work.
Some bum notes
Not all of life can be good and there were three moments in 2012 when life was less than pleasant - one trivial really but two of them a whole lot more serious.
Back in February I was at our head office for a training course and checked my mobile was switched to silent before I went in to the classroom. There was a text so naturally I read it first. It was from Christian and simply said something like, "Dad phone me as soon as you can". I don't get messages like that from him so decided to phone straight away. His first words to me were, "Dad, Mum's alright but . . ."
Peggy had woken in her flat to discover her hallway and front door were completely ablaze. In a nutshell, her flat was destroyed by a mix of fire, smoke and water and she genuinely was very lucky not to have been killed by the fire.
You just don't imagine how big an impact a major fire has on someone's life until you see it for yourself, the things that are lost forever, facing the next day with no clothes, toiletries, nothing but what you stand in - and on that first day Peggy stood in Christian's tracksuit bottoms and an anorak.
The blessing is that she survived unharmed. But the impact of that fire continues to this day - sudden noises in her home or the smell of something burning will always cause a deep fear in Peggy.
The trivial thing was a trip I took to my doctor. Back in 1973 I needed a medical for something or other, went to see what had always been the family GP and as he was filling in the forms he looked at my notes and said, "Ah yes - I see in 1952 you had a cough!" I have lived a life of never knowing what my doctor looked like because I just never used to see them. Until this old heart malarkey kicked off.
All of my prescriptions had a note on them saying I was due for a medication review in May 2012. Not being familiar with how doctor's type things work I booked an appointment so he could review my medication. I thought it was the thing I needed to do. And because I really don't go to a doctor any more than is absolutely necessary I thought I would use this medication review to tell him about a minor thing which had cropped up and certainly wasn't worth an appointment on its own. Simply, when I have a wee sometimes it flows out normally, sometimes it almost dribbles out. I think they warn men of a certain age to look out for that sort of change.
Having told him about my little problem he mumbled something about different options, looked at me and asked me if I wanted to do things the hard way or easy way. And in that moment from the tone in his voice and the look on his face the penny dropped that he thought I was wasting his time.
In that instant I wished so hard that I could just vanish out of the surgery and, more significantly, lost whatever confidence I ever had dealing with doctors or medical staff generally.
I've had more notes on prescriptions telling me I need a medication review because of a change in the stuff I'm taking and had a leaflet asking me to call in for a check-up they like to give to people of more advanced years. Like myself! But I can't bring myself to go, feel like I'd be wasting their time again.
And that, I think, is a real shame.
The final bum note of the year was my old dad passing away. He'd already been lost to us as dementia took its pernicious grip on his mind but his death was hastened by a wrong diagnosis which seemed to be a cruel ending for such a gentle man.
His funeral actually took place two days into this year but it counts as a 2012 event in my eyes being intrinsically linked to his passing away before the year end.
His funeral was treated as a quasi military affair because of his service in the Royal Air Force as a young man and then as a Reserve in his later life. As the funeral ceremony came to an end a door at the side of the crematorium was opened and the most beautiful rendition of The Last Post was played by a lone bugler.
I can't lie to you.
There were tears.
Shattered illusions
Let's not finish on a sad note, though. Instead let me show you just what a dipstick I can be at times and how I got to discover that some of your best hopes and fantasies are best left as just that.
By pure chance I happened to notice in a newspaper that the woman I most fancied - other than my Tania, of course - the French actress Juliette Binoche was appearing in a play at the Barbican Theatre in London. It was all I could do not to wet myself with excitement, and I actually managed to convince Tania it would be a good night out.
Bear in mind here that the play was the night before we were due to start our holiday. And, in fact, our holiday was due to start with the 8 o'clock morning Shuttle from Dover to Calais.
The only way we were going to make this work was for me to book a hotel near the Shuttle terminal, get a train from there to London, meet up with Tania who would need to have changed her clothing when she finished work, off out to dinner then to the theatre. It would also need for us to jump on a train late at night to get back to the hotel, a short night's sleep and then up very early for our trip under the channel.
Tania was prepared to put up with all this faffing about and inconvenience so that I could actually see my little heart-throb in the flesh, so to speak.
Did I mention, by the way, that the play was in French?? With subtitles written above the stage??
Now - what can I tell you about Madame Binoche and this play?
Well - the truth is when it comes to that indefinable something called star quality Juliette Binoche has none of it. She's a good actress but that is all. The only person tugging my heartstrings that night was Tania.
They say never meet your heroes. I should have listened.
And the play?
F*ck me, it was awful! Really, really crap.
Poor Tania sat there through two hours of purgatory thinking to herself that she'd better try and look interested to please her man. You could hear the palpable relief in her when, as the cast took their curtain call, I asked in a plaintive, almost pleading voice, "Can we go now?!!?"
So long, 2012.
I had forgotten just how good Young Turks was.
Is.
If you see me and it looks like I'm talking to myself I'll be singing this song.
Farewell fickle mistress
In the Spring of 2012 I watched the little low-loader truck drive away with my Mazda sports car on it and as I walked back indoors realised I had, in that moment, just lost five and a half thousand pounds. And I punched the air in delight!!
I had always wanted an MX5 and envisaged the delights of driving on sunny days with the top down, in some ways reliving the feelings I used to get when riding my motorbikes in a previous life. And I did indeed get to have my days of windswept hair. Driving it home from work with the top down certainly seemed to make my 35 mile commute less of an ordeal.
What I hadn't bargained for was its capricious behaviour during the winter. Four times the car spun on dead straight roads without any provocation from me, once at a ridiculous five miles per hour, once on a motorway when I missed the barriers my millimetres and good fortune alone.
.
 |
| Grrrrrrr! |
I have never hated a car so much in all my life. To see the back of it as it was taken away was worth every penny of that five and half grand, believe me.
A Broad Abroad!
This bit has nothing to do with a woman in a foreign land - I just liked the title, that's all.
But it is to do with travelling abroad.
Three trips this year. Italy. Versailles. France.
The Italian trip included finally making it to Pisa, Florence and Rome plus some other stuff which I'll come to. Of those three cities I allowed one day for the Leaning Tower and then two days each for Florence and Rome.
I didn't even last one whole day in any of them. Man, I hated them all so much. Too busy, too crowded, too noisy, too full of people trying to make a buck, or a Euro I guess, out of tourist tat.
In the few hundred yards we walked from the nearest Metro station to the Vatican we were pestered literally every five or six yards by somebody trying to get us to take a guided tour.
Get me out of here!
But the rest of Italy was great.
I loved driving on the country roads from place to place.
The highlight beyond any doubt was making it to Coriano, the home town of the motorcycle racer, Marco Simoncelli who had been killed six months earlier in a freak accident in Malaysia.
At first we thought the town hadn't done anything to commemorate their boy but then we stumbled upon a site at the front of the church with flowers, a collection of photos from throughout his life, a banner that visitors could sign - and yes I did. It was just a tasteful spot to pay homage to a man who was destined to become a great racer and one of the sport's most charismatic men.
What impressed most was discovering that virtually the whole town was supporting the plan to build a memorial to the racer but not one of them was trying to make money for themselves out of it. We had come from Valentino Rossi's home town and there everyone was on the make - the contrast was stark.
They even thought to change the number of the local bus route to 58, Marco's racing number.
Ciao e grazie SuperSic . . .
The two weeks travelling through France in October with Tania were heavenly, discovering places I hadn't seen before, Albi, Briançon,etc and finally making it to Monaco for the first time since my childhood was a treat. I had promised myself I would drive around the roads used for the Grand Prix but it quickly became obvious that it would be a tortuous drive. Instead I walked the whole of the circuit and discovered it really is quite small - didn't take long at all. Can tick that off my to-do list.
Monaco is very up itself, though.
Another memorable moment was visiting Tania's childhood friend, Tonina and her husband Pino near Turin in Italy. Have you ever experienced that moment when sometimes in life you meet someone and you know instantly you have just become part of a really special friendship? So it was with this couple and their children. Lovely, lovely people. And aren't multilingual conversations the best ever! Ours swayed between English, Italian and French - sometimes in the one sentence.
Oops! I lied. As I was reviewing this I realised there had been a fourth trip this year - how could I forget? Five days in Tenerife in November. It's where Tania and I made a new friend . . .
It was on this trip that I heard my best joke of 2012 - but sadly it only works if you can say it - writing it won't work.
Some bum notes
Not all of life can be good and there were three moments in 2012 when life was less than pleasant - one trivial really but two of them a whole lot more serious.
Back in February I was at our head office for a training course and checked my mobile was switched to silent before I went in to the classroom. There was a text so naturally I read it first. It was from Christian and simply said something like, "Dad phone me as soon as you can". I don't get messages like that from him so decided to phone straight away. His first words to me were, "Dad, Mum's alright but . . ."
Peggy had woken in her flat to discover her hallway and front door were completely ablaze. In a nutshell, her flat was destroyed by a mix of fire, smoke and water and she genuinely was very lucky not to have been killed by the fire.
You just don't imagine how big an impact a major fire has on someone's life until you see it for yourself, the things that are lost forever, facing the next day with no clothes, toiletries, nothing but what you stand in - and on that first day Peggy stood in Christian's tracksuit bottoms and an anorak.
The blessing is that she survived unharmed. But the impact of that fire continues to this day - sudden noises in her home or the smell of something burning will always cause a deep fear in Peggy.
The trivial thing was a trip I took to my doctor. Back in 1973 I needed a medical for something or other, went to see what had always been the family GP and as he was filling in the forms he looked at my notes and said, "Ah yes - I see in 1952 you had a cough!" I have lived a life of never knowing what my doctor looked like because I just never used to see them. Until this old heart malarkey kicked off.
All of my prescriptions had a note on them saying I was due for a medication review in May 2012. Not being familiar with how doctor's type things work I booked an appointment so he could review my medication. I thought it was the thing I needed to do. And because I really don't go to a doctor any more than is absolutely necessary I thought I would use this medication review to tell him about a minor thing which had cropped up and certainly wasn't worth an appointment on its own. Simply, when I have a wee sometimes it flows out normally, sometimes it almost dribbles out. I think they warn men of a certain age to look out for that sort of change.
Having told him about my little problem he mumbled something about different options, looked at me and asked me if I wanted to do things the hard way or easy way. And in that moment from the tone in his voice and the look on his face the penny dropped that he thought I was wasting his time.
In that instant I wished so hard that I could just vanish out of the surgery and, more significantly, lost whatever confidence I ever had dealing with doctors or medical staff generally.
I've had more notes on prescriptions telling me I need a medication review because of a change in the stuff I'm taking and had a leaflet asking me to call in for a check-up they like to give to people of more advanced years. Like myself! But I can't bring myself to go, feel like I'd be wasting their time again.
And that, I think, is a real shame.
The final bum note of the year was my old dad passing away. He'd already been lost to us as dementia took its pernicious grip on his mind but his death was hastened by a wrong diagnosis which seemed to be a cruel ending for such a gentle man.
His funeral actually took place two days into this year but it counts as a 2012 event in my eyes being intrinsically linked to his passing away before the year end.
His funeral was treated as a quasi military affair because of his service in the Royal Air Force as a young man and then as a Reserve in his later life. As the funeral ceremony came to an end a door at the side of the crematorium was opened and the most beautiful rendition of The Last Post was played by a lone bugler.
I can't lie to you.
There were tears.
 |
| Dad RIP |
Let's not finish on a sad note, though. Instead let me show you just what a dipstick I can be at times and how I got to discover that some of your best hopes and fantasies are best left as just that.
By pure chance I happened to notice in a newspaper that the woman I most fancied - other than my Tania, of course - the French actress Juliette Binoche was appearing in a play at the Barbican Theatre in London. It was all I could do not to wet myself with excitement, and I actually managed to convince Tania it would be a good night out.
 |
| Juliette Binoche |
The only way we were going to make this work was for me to book a hotel near the Shuttle terminal, get a train from there to London, meet up with Tania who would need to have changed her clothing when she finished work, off out to dinner then to the theatre. It would also need for us to jump on a train late at night to get back to the hotel, a short night's sleep and then up very early for our trip under the channel.
Tania was prepared to put up with all this faffing about and inconvenience so that I could actually see my little heart-throb in the flesh, so to speak.
Did I mention, by the way, that the play was in French?? With subtitles written above the stage??
Now - what can I tell you about Madame Binoche and this play?
Well - the truth is when it comes to that indefinable something called star quality Juliette Binoche has none of it. She's a good actress but that is all. The only person tugging my heartstrings that night was Tania.
They say never meet your heroes. I should have listened.
And the play?
F*ck me, it was awful! Really, really crap.
Poor Tania sat there through two hours of purgatory thinking to herself that she'd better try and look interested to please her man. You could hear the palpable relief in her when, as the cast took their curtain call, I asked in a plaintive, almost pleading voice, "Can we go now?!!?"
So long, 2012.
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