Resolve December 30, 2006
Posted by BiB in Uncategorized.trackback
Maybe I’ll find some resolve in time to have a resolution for 2008.
But I do have hopes for 2007. Or rather, a hope. By this time next year, I hope to be living under round-the-clock medical supervision in a house by the sea. I hope to spend much of my time there, while not having my drip changed, looking out over the water. Occasionally, I will get restless, and the friends and medical staff – all female – looking after my every need and whim will rush around in a panic, flashing each other concerned looks and wondering what the best short-term solution will be. I will shout for wine and fags, and wine and fags will be provided.
From 2007 onwards, I will only be wheeled out into public for the rarest and most important of social events. The assembled company will be thankful that I seem to be in a restful near-coma, attached to my drip, in a distant corner, but I’ll aim for a scandal-count of at least one per occasion. Just when others are settling nicely into tiddliness, I’ll rip my drip out and start banging my walking-stick loudly off the metal frame of the bed (I’m chained to). The men present will drink on. I’ll hear, “Just ignore him,” in manly tones. But some of the ladies will dutifully spring up. Once they’ve given me the necessary dosage of oxygen for me to make an utterance, I’ll wheeze, “Speech. Speech.” A wet flannel will be applied to my wrinkled, sweaty brow. “I won’t be ignored,” I’ll add, glennclosishly, “like some kinduva cunt.”
“He wants to say something,” the ladies will say fretfully to the men.
“Let the old bastard speak,” the men will answer, taking hefty swigs and realigning their balls as one.
And then I’ll heave myself up onto my elbows, see the eyes piercing my frail frame, and start spewing forth some vitriol, with targeted attacks on each of the people present. “I never liked you,” I’ll start bitterly, targeting the best-looking man present, “and as for your wife…” And then my elbows will slip, and I’ll crash back onto my bed, and then I’ll be heard to burst into unmanly tears, and the one woman who’s decided that, in spite of such a performance, I still deserve to be looked after, will reapply the damp flannel and say, “There, there, BiB. Helga (or something) dab it better.” And I’ll be rechained to the bed and wheeled to the most distant (and soundproofed) room of the house by the sea.
Or maybe I’ll just stay here after all.
BiB 
That’s your resolution? I can’t possibly beat that – I think I’ll stick to ‘try to go to bed earlier’.
(I do prefer my current state of disestablishment – what was my mistake?)
The wonders of Technorati…
Well, it’s an unresolved resolution. Or a resolution without resolve. I’m not actually going to STRIVE for it to happen, but if it does, I won’t put up any resistance when Helga arrives with the handcuffs.
BiB, you funny. I would stand in line to mop your brow after Helga.
Oy, no sooner do we get the Christmas posts out the way than we have to come up with the New Year’s Resolutions… there is no end to it…
Annie, count your lucky stars that you’re not an Orthodox Christian. If you were, you’d have January 6th/7th – Orthodox Christmas – to look forward to and, if you were in Russia, January 13th (or maybe 14th, can’t remember) too, which is Old New Year, i.e. New Year by the old calendar. Mind you, neither of those is celebrated that much really, but still. Of course I can’t remember any previous Januaries, but I’ve got a feeling it might be not far behind November on the shit-month scale. Roll on mercifully short February. Freezing, but almost spring.
Luckily, my life is already a bit like that. Although I don’t heave myself onto my elbows for anyone.
Wyndham, I hadn’t thought of the option of having a partner in crime for when I’ll be looking out to sea. Which makes it all a far jollier prospect.
Make that a trio.
Beaman, you’re more than welcome in my house by the sea any time, which sounds more flirtatious than it’s meant to. And I don’t have a house by the sea. But just you look out in 2007 houses by the sea! Gonna get me one (on the proviso that it’s free).
I am in a house by the sea this very moment. From my window I can see ships on the horizon and seagulls swooping over church spires and shopping bag strewn trees. No, it’s not Liverpool.
If I said you can see another country from my window, you can probably guess where.
It sounds marvellous. Are you in Dover? How lovely! In England, which I like, but France, which I also like, visible. To be honest, the fantasy house I was imagining is sort of modelled on one I’ve been to in Denmark. But I did just announce to the Russian that I’m moving to Rostock next year.
You guessed correctly.
Rostock. A nice medieval city. The coast up there is so beautiful.
…except that I haven’t really thought about where to relocate to by the sea, and I don’t know Rostock at all, but, of course, I PROBABLY won’t move to a house by the sea, but I’m sure there’s not a cat in hell’s chance I’d get round to moving to a house by the sea if the house was abroad too. Oh gosh. Am I in Germany for ever?
In any case, I hope you’ve welcomed in the New Year happily and festively. Here’s hoping for a good year ahead.
Hear hear! as my MP shouts in the Commons. A Welsh MP for Dover, he must think he is stuck in England forever.
Happy New Year.
Is Dover nice at this time of year then? Maybe we could swap residences?
God’s Speed m’dear!
Um, thanks (I think).
Dover, I’m afraid, is never nice, unless you are out walking along the cliffs or live in the outskirts. The views across the port and channel are excellent but the town, ugh!
I will be moving to Canterbury soon. Then it will definitely be worth swapping residences but it’s not by the sea. Excellent ice cream cafes though.
Ah, by the way, you have to share a bed with two cats, they will get very cranky with you if you refuse.
Oh dear, I’m asthmatic. And the deal might seem all the less appealing when I warn you that you might have to swap the two cats for a burly Russian… I’m not sure I have a proper internal relationship with Kent. West Sussex is my spiritual, non-London home, truth be told, although I still find it a struggle having to say hello to EVERYONE you pass on the street when within the county’s borders.
A friend of mine went to Rostock in the mid 1990s and said the first thing he was saw was a burning car, after which things went downhill slightly. Although the beaches were , apparently, very nice.
I’ve only been through Rostock to get on the ferry to Denmark, and admittedly everything I saw looked rather as if it had been built that week. So I missed the nice bits altogether. I must say, though, the more I wallow in this fantasy world of my house by the sea (and round-the-clock nursing care) by the end of the year, the more I want it to be on a “northern” beach. Not that I’ll refuse a house if someone wants to give me one and it’s in France, or Thailand, or Australia (or even the Falklands, probably), but I’d like something nice and duney with brilliant northern summer light and windy bleakness in winter. Maybe I’ll move to Lithuania. Although the Catholicism would be a struggle.
Would you expect to have a lot to say in confession?
You could always try one of the more rural bits of the Kaliningrad exclave, and then you get Baltic seascapes and er, shorescapes (if that’s a word) plus it’s in Russia nowadays.
Also I guess property would be quite cheap; I can’t imagine people are queuing up to buy second homes in Baltiysk.
But there are probably chances that Germans are trying to get ‘their’ piece of property/land ‘back’ (as in all of “Eastern Prussia”), which would make buying anything there a) cheap-ish while b) a pretty poor/very risky ‘investment’.
Yeah, there’s nothing more likely to shatter a rural idyll than some guy from Stuttgart turning up waving the title deeds to Grandfather’s farm.
Daggi/Leon, I think you’ve very nicely talked me out of the Kaliningradskaya oblast’. Although I’m sure the landscape would suit, and I’d cope with the lingo. Is Sovetsk on the coast? Living in a place straightforwardly called Sovetsk might shatter the idyll as much as the Swabian.
David, in Lithuania, where the people are the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, I would struggle not to have the odd lascivious thought. But I’d walk past the Church of St. Gediminas, or whoever the saints are in Lithuania, and I wouldn’t give the priest a second thought. But I might still struggle with Catholicism all over the place. Well, not struggle. But be bemused. I remember being surprised at just quite how many new churches there were in Bialystok in eastern Poland when I went there for ten minutes in 2000 or 2001. I’ve got a feeling Lithuania is Catholic à la polonaise, rather than à la tchèque.
Sovetsk is on a river rather than the coast, but is just across the border from Lithuania…
Hmm, still not convinced it’s the place for me. I was once in the utterly boring town of Palanga in Lithuania which, geographically, at least, should fit the bill. But I was staying with someone too tall, whom I was scared of, and who wanted me to eat Lithuanian delicacies like fried pig’s ear and it was grim, grim, grim. I even went to the amber museum… Annoyingly, Klaipeda, which looked like a proper place, was just down the road but he deemed that we were only allowed to go there for twelve seconds, and we didn’t even get out of the car. Those Estonian islands probably have plenty of abandoned wooden structures that would fit the bill nicely.
How about Bornholm?
Returning to Estonian islands for a moment, I also note there’s one called Linnusitamaa, whose name apparently translates as “bird shit land”.
I’ve heard good things about Bornholm, actually. I must get onto my Danish pals and ask if it’d suit me. And they’d be able to pop over and look after me a couple of times a year and renew my sock-&-underpant drawer.
I recognise the linnus and maa bits from Finnish and can wholeheartedly corroborate that they mean bird and land. But I don’t know Estonian (or Finnish) for shit. Still, it’s not a good advertisement for the place, is it?
Hmm, Denmark would probably be easier to live in than Estonia, whereas Estonia is probably a tad more exotic. Choices, choices.