Every year Christmas rolls toward me like a deadline, a reminder of all I have failed to achieve in the preceding 12 months. After a few weeks of frantically trying to tie up loose ends, the deadline passes and I realise that everything that didn’t happen in 2023 simply didn’t need to happen, with the exception of certain important outgoing payments.
But this is not the time of year to dwell on steep fines or legal threats. It’s a moment to reflect on one’s actual progress – or regress – using cold, hard numbers. Here then, are my personal statistics for the 12 months ending 25 December 2023.
0 Children now living at home. This project has been 29 years in the making, but at the time of going to press, all three of my adult sons are housed off the premises. There is a special word for the feeling of shutting the front door on that last child as he sets off to live his own life, and that word is: bereft. On the other hand, a litre of milk now lasts a whole week.
1 Foxes found hanging out in my office. Now I have to keep the door shut.
60 Age I became in 2023. This milestone was reached in June, since when I’ve had time to weigh the sense of my own impending demise against all the free bus travel, and to come to the conclusion that to break even I need to take way more buses.
340 Approximate number of times I have fed the dog in the past 12 months, reckoning with holidays, weekends away and occasionally just forgetting.
1,470 Times, approximately, I have fed the cat in the same period.
3 Phases of my wife’s proposed home improvement plan, according to her presentation in August. Phase one consisted of redecorating the bedroom, building cupboards, moving a radiator and installing new lighting. Phase two was redoing the bathroom. Phase three involved some overdue repairs to the mouldy recess that houses the washing machine. But then the garden wall blew down and fixing it became the new phase three. Then the roof started leaking in the middle of phase two, leading to the hasty back formation of phase one B (URGENT).
I’m not sure where we are now, although I overheard my wife and Mark the builder discussing a phase seven when they thought I wasn’t in. Personally I think we should be allowed to start the numbering all over again when the new year begins.
75% of garden trellis replaced, by me, since the fallen wall was rebuilt. I wouldn’t call this a rewarding experience, but I learned a lot about how expansion bolts work – and how they don’t. My wife refuses to characterise six out of eight trellis sections as a job well done, but for personal satisfaction, it’s been more than sufficient.
23 Live dates the band I’m in played in 2023 – that is up from 21 in 2022 and a near-full return to pre-Covid levels.
89 Days my music equipment spent piled in the living room, either waiting to be loaded into the car, or having just been unloaded.
112/60 Perfectly unremarkable blood pressure reading I forwarded to my GP’s surgery in April, having spent £28 on a blood pressure monitor.
18 Goes it took me before I got a reading I felt happy sending to my GP.
7 Times I have been forced to appear in short films to be posted on the website of my wife’s company, which sells stylish aids for elderly people. I’ve gathered leaves using a rake with a special handle, worn reading glasses with little lights in the frames and demonstrated a radio with super-large buttons. I find these sessions both humiliating and difficult, because I cannot act, but my wife refuses to accept this excuse. “You don’t have to act old,” she says. “You just have to look old.”
13 Bad things I imagined we’d find if we ever opened the mystery room – a sealed-up loft space above our bedroom, to which we had no access. These included: a hornet’s nest, a water tank full of drowned squirrels, an unexploded bomb, a quantity of treasure guarded by snakes, a skeleton in an Edwardian wedding dress, asbestos. But when Mark the builder cut a hole in the ceiling all we found was a light switch. The bulb still worked.
47 Boxes of junk which now fill our newly renovated loft space, complete with folding ladder. It sounds better than a skeleton in a dress, but honestly, it’s no easier to sleep.
Merry Christmas.
