When I look back over the previous 12 months, I remember it largely as a year of lucky escapes – I dodged that ice bucket challenge, for example – but my powers of recall are increasingly unreliable, so I find it helps to go back through the calendar and crunch the numbers. Here, then, is a highlight of my year in statistics:
274: approximate number of times a robot has asked me to “Please press five” on my telephone keypad in order to claim a refund. I am never going to press five, or even nine to opt out. I haven’t answered my landline in six years, and I only hear these messages every three weeks or so, when I erase the contents of my voicemail. If the robots are planning to take over any time soon, they’re going to have to do a lot better than this.
50: copies of my book that I autographed, in less than 20 minutes, at a recent book-signing event at a cafe in Glasgow. Only two people actually turned up to buy any (and, if I’m honest, one of those turned up with her own copy), but I figured that if I signed the lot, they wouldn’t be able to return them to the publisher. I apologised to the bookseller for having to cart so many copies back to the bookshop, but he said it was only a few doors along in the same street.
“Huh,” I said. “I suppose I could have just come down there.”
“No,” he said. “It’s incredibly busy right now.”
43: live dates. By my own reckoning, this is the total number of gigs the band I’m in played last year. Written down like that, it seems like a lot, and that figure doesn’t include promotional radio appearances, the evening we busked at Waterloo station for charity or that time we played in a library. If you factor in rehearsals and travel time to and from venues as far flung as Penzance and Perth, not to mention the amount of money I’ve spent replacing lost or damaged equipment, it suddenly becomes abundantly clear what my wife is so pissed off about.
3: major appliances that have died this year – tumble dryer, dishwasher, oven. I cannot claim that I received insufficient warning. The dryer had long been behaving erratically. The oven was at least 25 years old – it was here when we moved in – and had had most of its important parts replaced at least once, but they don’t make its important parts any more. Two other major appliances (the washing machine and the brand new dishwasher) have required professional repair, and one minor appliance (the coffee maker I got last Christmas) has been neither replaced nor repaired since it started leaking in February. We just stare at it while the kettle boils.
2: number of occasions in 2014 when I was heckled by my own wife in public. This is not bad going; some years it’s more. The first time was at a talk when an audience member asked me a question about choosing a primary school for one’s child, and my wife stood up and shouted, “HE WON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THAT.” The second time was at the band’s last gig of the year, when I could hear her yelling something that sounded like “YAHOO!” from the bar all through the first set. Only later did I realise she was saying “YOUR HAIR!”
1: oenological awards received. Last month, the guy at the corner shop gave me a spontaneous £1.50 discount off my bottle of wine when I didn’t have quite enough money.
“So what?” my wife said. “That’s just nice.”
“No 1 wine customer,” I said. “That’s what he called me.”
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