By all accounts, 2017 has been a tumultuous year, not least for me. Faced with so many changes in such a short period of time, it’s all too easy to lose one’s bearings. That’s why, when it comes to taking stock in the dark days before the new year dawns, I find it helpful to restrict myself to cold, hard numbers. Below is my personal statistical index for 2017, using the latest obtainable figures:
0.42: number of years at present address.
23.8: number of years at previous address.
9: approximate man hours I’ve spent, since mid-July, searching for the nicer of our two bread knives, before accepting that it probably didn’t survive the move.
14: additional number of fruitless hours spent in search of, among other things, the paper tray attachment for the printer; my rear bike light; one of two electric whisk blades; the contents of my middle desk drawer; and all products and equipment related to the shining of shoes. It is perfectly possible to live without any of this stuff, if you can only teach yourself to stop wondering what happened to it all. I can’t.
11: average additional number of minutes I’ve had to factor into a simple excursion to the local shops, because everyone in Acton is so bloody friendly.
50+: approximate number of sound-effect options offered by the wireless doorbell designed to connect my new office shed with the outside world, or at least with people trying to deliver stuff to our front door. The selection includes a cock crowing, three doorbell noises and snatches of Happy Birthday, Greensleeves, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Für Elise, The Sailor’s Hornpipe, Oh My Darling Clementine, We Wish You A Merry Christmas, Yesterday Once More, Red Wing, The Wabash Cannonball and the William Tell Overture. The sheer range available should go some way to explaining why I took the battery out last week.
0: minor children under my care as of May 2017.
3: male adults under the age of 25 currently living with me anyway.
50/50: likelihood, on any given day throughout the whole of 2017, that one of the three male adults was wearing my trousers, or my shoes, or was at large in greater London while in possession of my Oyster card.
48: roughly the additional number of hours I have been obliged to pretend to work because there were workmen in the house through the autumn months. In my experience, it’s almost impossible to spend a Tuesday afternoon lying on a sofa watching Escape To The Country with a cup of tea on your chest when someone is plastering the ceiling above you.
1: number of dolphins I’ve spotted in the Thames in 2017, including any such sighting that I subsequently sought to characterise in print as an uplifting, even slightly magical encounter, despite the high probability that the dolphin in question would be found dead at some point between deadline and publication. Live and learn.
32: approximate number of individual ring-necked parakeets responsible for the rapid emptying of my wife’s three bird feeders (intended for native species only) despite her insistence that it is the work of a single bird, known to her as “the green bastard”. Her refusal to accept the multiple parakeet model means that she is now locked in a psychological battle of wills that she is destined to lose.
24: according to my old diary, the exact number of live dates the band I’m in played in 2017, which is not a lot if you’re our tour promoter, but which, it turns out, is more than enough if you are seeking to characterise me as a selfish, absentee spouse for the purposes of winning an argument about an unloaded dishwasher.
13: according to my new diary, the number of live dates the band I’m in already has scheduled for the first half of 2018, which, it turns out, is still more than enough if you want to start an argument about unloaded dishwashers of the future. Tickets are still available. Not for the argument.
Happy new year.
