All is quiet on New Year's Day

On January 1st 2009, I spent all day in bed with a hangover, while the placid blue sky looked down on the industrious citizens of Hong Kong. This year I was better behaved: only some brandy and champagne and in bed by 1am, rather than standing in the taxi line at 7am wondering why I'd stayed out all night.

Even so, I was slow to start and groggy all day, as I battled through a thousand photographs from Taiwan and tried to put my life in some semblance of order. Matters weren't improved by watching three episodes of The Wire back to back, nor by eating a cheese sandwich and too many after-Christmas chocolates. The trouble is, there are so many episodes of The Wire left, and so many after-Christmas chocolates, that it's hard to foresee a time when such temptation will be gone from the apartment.

Maybe on Monday, when I have to be back at work. There's bound to be no chocolate there, for sure.

I did a little bit of pilates today (a few minutes, nothing major) and also ate some Marmite. But this was no ordinary Marmite. This was limited edition stuff, flavoured with beer. And it tasted much the same as Marmite always used to taste, malty and yeasty and brown and indescribeably odd, like something you shouldn't really be putting in your mouth. Whereas normal Marmite doesn't taste like that any more, it just tastes like ... well, like Marmite. Whereas the limited edition Marmite tastes strange, like Marmite used to taste before you were accustomed to it. So now I'm confused. Marmite doesn't taste like Marmite used to, it just tastes like Marmite, whereas the special Marmite tastes like Marmite, like Marmite did when you first tried it. No wonder I have a headache today.

I weighed myself. According to the ever-accurate forty-dollar scales that I bought from Japan Home Store, I weigh exactly 170 lbs.

Then I looked at my resolutions from a year ago:

2 marathons: 1 marathon. Oops.
A photo every week: Nope. Started the year well, gradually tailed off. By the third week of January, basically.
Meditate & stretch: didn't meditate more than three times. Need to work on that. Didn't really stretch, apart from at shorinji kempo - something that I hope the pilates will help with next year.
Write some more letters: I wrote one letter in 2009, to an old schoolfriend, but it was quite a good letter. And I posted at least 10 cards from Taiwan in the last week. That's not really enough though.
Comedy: Made it to the semi-finals. Or the first round, depending on how you want to cut it, but I think my performance was massively improved on my first public appearance back in October of 2008. Oh well, ever onward.
Sell 48 copies of Diet Croydon: Less than that. But a few copies were sold at the bookshop in Beckenham to people I've never met, so it's coming in dribs and drabs.
Stash some cash away: I think I have. I have to look at my bank balance on January 1 2009 and see whether it's higher or lower than it is now. Let's hope it's more than $12 up.
Learn some Cantonese: Well, I learned to say "turn the lights on" for a joke.
Learn to dance: Oops.
Play tennis: Not one game in 2009, as I recall. I thought I had played my father, but I remember now that this would only have happened if I'd gone back to England, and since I avoided Europe entirely for the year, that wasn't possible.

So... maybe I completed one resolution for 2009. At least this leaves ample room for improvement in 2010. Happy New Year! (Not that there's anywhere left in the world that I can think of that isn't in 2010 already...)