It was a very good year?

Did you ever listen to Frank Sinatra singing ‘It Was A Very Good Year’ – I mean, really listen to it? Off you pop then, Spotify or Amazon or whatever… You’re back – great. Let’s get on with it then.

He can be a miserable old sod, but my good friend Frank hints at a valid observation. Each new year doesn’t sit in isolation. A year-by-year life would be great, and who doesn’t love a blue-blooded girl of independent means, but every new year nods its head at the rotting carcass of the last. It’s like the rear-view mirror in a movie where Jimmy Stewart is driving a car – wobbly and disconcertingly unreal. You can always see more than seems possible, and none of it is particularly encouraging. Let’s face it – last year was a train-wreck.

If I were a high-self-worth individual I’d be able to paper over the cracks in a jiffy. A quick shuffle of my Instagram account, a few well-judged tweets and bingo! A new ‘me’ would be up and running. Brighter, more confident, eating more greens and completing more marathons every day. But, I’m a pale and squishy mortal being, and have not yet been absorbed into the social-media Matrix where such transformations are apparently possible, albeit virtually. For me - last year is looking more like a prediction than a history.

In that last year I made a significant dent in those fabled lakes of wine and mountains of butter. Heck, I even went Frasier Crane on the whole thing and had a slice of bacon on top. Being locked in my house gave me the perfect excuse to eat, drink, and be merry and I took full advantage. I did not grow my social circle, I did not grow my mind. I grew my waistline and my liver instead.

So, what should I do this spring where nothing much seems to have changed? I’m always open to suggestions so I’ve taken on board the prevailing recommendations. These seem to revolve around the following basics:

• I should become super-organized. Everything should be written down and diagrammed in a specially purchased notebook. Stickers are optional but encouraged.
• I should worship the sacred temple that is my body. Yoga, yoghurt and other things beginning with ‘Y’ should be the order of the day, every day. Twice a day at weekends.
• I should throw away all my stuff. It’s filling my house, weighing me down and will engulf me in a tidal wave of possessions if I don’t immediately hire a bark-chipper and start feeding things into it.

Spoiler alert – I’m not going to do any of these things. But what am I going to do? Life is a journey, and that does mean change. So, instead of doubling-down I’m going to be doubling-up. It’s exciting, isn’t it? ‘Less is more’ seems like a nice idea, and has come back into vogue in these contrarian times, but ‘more is more’ is the kind of truth I can really get behind.

What is a spring forward into a doubled-up life going to look like though? It can’t be just as simple as having two Cadbury’s Flake in my 99 (international readers will have to look up that UK reference). There has to be something more meaningful.

And there is.

I’m going to resist the emptiness that a super-organized world inevitably leads to. I look at those Sunday-supplement perfect homes, with their spotless (empty) kitchens and their perfectly tidy (and empty) lounges. This is not for me. I’m going to embrace the mess. Not the sort of mess that involves rotting food and fossilised mouse-corpses, of course, but the kind of joyous productive mess that Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman talk about in their book ‘A Perfect Mess’. Creativity can’t flourish when your life is buttoned-down and filed away, held to an ideal schedule. The mess doesn’t even have to be a physical one, though that helps. The mess can just be inside your head – a great big melting-pot of ideas introducing themselves to each other and finding something interesting to do.

I’m going to have fun. Is that even allowed anymore? My supermarket now has spots stuck on the floor that you have to stand on, and you’re only allowed to shuffle from one spot to the next when the voice in the ceiling shouts ‘Change Places!’ If you do anything that is not expressly permitted, then someone comes and shouts at you in person. In short, it’s not fun. So – it’s off into the wilderness for me, where the only tweets I’ll be exposed to are the real ones uttered by little birds. There’s a very apt poem by the great and under-appreciated poet Robert Service, which contains the following.

No internet, no Instagram, no Facebook, no Twitter, no rolling 24-hour news, no smartphone, no vacuous box-set television. Big skies, fresh air, sometimes rain, sometimes shine, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, little animals, big animals, little paw-prints in mud, birds singing in trees, rivers rushing along, trees of every imaginable size shape and colour, delicately scented pine-cones, a world quilted in snow, waves lapping a sandy shore, long grasses dancing in the wind, and me.

I’m going to add more ‘things’ into my life, acquire more ‘stuff’. Bah! I hear you say. ‘Boy’s gone mad – things don’t make you happy, can’t make you happy.’ This is certainly the view of the gilded Eloi who are our political and economic overlords at the World Economic Forum, who tell us that ‘You’ll own nothing, and be perfectly happy.’ Well, ask somebody who has nothing if they’re perfectly happy and I think the answer you’ll get is a solid ‘no’

But look, this is not an avaricious move to acquire BMW cars, Gucci suits and golfing paraphernalia. The kind of stuff I’m talking about here is the stuff that has meaning and usually doesn’t cost very much. Let’s dive into a list:

• More photographs of my family and friends. Not hidden in the cloud, but on a real piece of paper.
• More typewriters. That e-mail you sent yesterday will be lining the e-kitty tray tomorrow, but a type-written letter, as well as being LEGIBLE, will also be kept. When you have lots of typewriters you can give them away and loan them – and you start getting letters then.
• More books. A book is your friend forever.
• More art. I am a huge admirer of young people who go to art college and try to make a life by creating. How the heck are they going to pay the rent and buy food? Well, they can only do that if we buy their work. So, I’m going to buy more – there’s so much great work out there.

If there’s a takeaway message from all this, and I hope there is, it’s that for the coming spring I’m going to be doing things my way. It’s probably not your way, nor should it be, but I think it might just make me a bit happier. And that sounds like a good plan.

Let’s go out with a song – a Spotify singalong for the true cinematic experience. Frank, take it away…