As I look back over the turbulent events of the last 12 months, I’m aware that my perception of things is a little warped. Recent events loom larger than older ones, and others blend together and overlap. I also tend to revise my memories so that, in retrospect, I come out seeming a better person than I am. For the sake of accuracy, it helps, I find, to review the year in terms of its cold, hard numbers. These, then, are my personal statistics for 2016.
107: approximate number of mornings, over the course of the last year, that I have been obliged to reflect upon the rather elastic meaning of the word “compatible” when applied to an off-brand coffee pod. On each of these occasions, I have also been denied coffee, which eventually led to me falling out of love with what was briefly our household’s favourite Christmas present of 2015.
34: number of times I have pretended to understand what my oldest son is saying as he patiently attempts to explain some aspect of set theory to me. “You can define a function over a set, and we’ll call that set x,” he will say, slowly. “And the function n of x is itself a set, which contains all the members of sets which are themselves members of x.” I nod seriously, but inside my head there is nothing beyond a light pinging noise akin to the sound made by a smoke detector with a low battery.
Prior to these little lectures, I have never exhibited the slightest curiosity about sets, although I do sometimes wonder how I have managed to raise a child whose idea of a birthday present is a book called A First Look At Rigorous Probability Theory.
25: approximate number of times Constance has left our house shouting, “Feel free to write about me!” as she shuts the front door behind her. She invariably then sends me a text that says, “Keep my secrets, or else.”
18: exact number of messages posted on the new Dowling family WhatsApp group across the difficult early hours of Wednesday 9 November. This included one scream emoji and two that simply said “uh oh”. The final message, sent by the middle one from university, was posted at 4.12am, and reads, “all hail president trump”.
5: according to my wife, this is the length of time, in minutes, that one is obliged to wait before talking unguardedly about someone who has just left your house. I had never heard of the so-called five-minute rule before a few months ago, but apparently there’s a high probability guests will suddenly reappear during that window, and they deserve the opportunity to retrieve their keys or their phone in blissful ignorance of other people’s opinions of them. I’m not sure the rule applies to Constance.
1: pieces of actual useful advice offered up in this column over the course of a year. This happened just a few weeks ago, when I suggested that the secret to a happy life in a house full of adolescent boys is the strict assignment of colour-coded underpants for all males in residence. Nothing I have ever written has received such a positive reception, and it’s pretty clear to me that my advice has already changed lives.
“What do you mean, your advice?” my wife said when I told her. “Colour-coded pants was my idea.”
“I’ve popularised it,” I said. “Which is just as important.”
“Everything,” my wife said. “Everything that functions in this house, everything interesting, everything funny, that’s all me. And you just steal it.”
“I know,” I say. “It’s my job.”
Happy New Year.
