You'll Be Seeing Less Of Me In Future

I know I’ve already wished y’all a Happy New Year, and I’ll doubtless do so in my first post of 2008, and it already is 2008 for my Australian reader(s), but here’s wishing you a Happy New Year anyway.

Looking back at past entries for the same time in previous years, I see that – predictably – I said I was determined to lose weight. It hasn’t happened. I’m going to be 32 next month, and so I’m getting to the stage where being too heavy means I'm rolling the dice with my life.

This is reason enough to get fit, but I want to do it for aesthetic reasons too, and also because I just don’t see myself as a fat person spiritually. There are things I fear about losing weight, but I don’t feel that my current condition is the real me.

That being so, it’s time to eat better, and exercise more. The method is straightforward for almost all of us (and certainly for me). The doing is harder.

I think the key is just to do it. A counsel of perfection isn’t the way forward – accepting that I’ll have good and bad days but that I need to change my lifestyle is better. I’ve written before about my need for black and white. It’s clear that in this area of my life, I have to live with shades of grey.

It’s not about giving up crisps. I didn’t eat crisps until the last few days of my three months in South Carolina, yet I put on a stone. It is about making such things treats, and eating proportionately and healthily. It’s about learning to cook. And when I slip, I need to jump back on the wagon and not get despondent.

And it’s about exercise. I want to walk more, to go to the gym more, to play squash and five-a-side football and to dance more. I want these things to be more of a pleasure.

I need to embrace what I can become, not slip into a slough of despond about what I have become.

And I need to think and talk and write about it less, and get on with it now.

Almost entirely unrelatedly (but not quite, as fitness impacts on everything) I want to take my comedy career on to a new level. I need to do more gigs and to travel further afield. I’ve progressed ability wise, but I want to share my laughter with the world!

Good luck for all that you wish for and all the good stuff that you haven’t even wished for in 2008. Keep reading, and drop me a line at the email address above.

Merry Christmas And A Happy New Year

May the big days themselves, and the days around them, be joyous and peaceful.

It's been a good year for your humble blogger. It began by being made redundant from one position and ended with my going full time in another. In between I worked on a very good book by Peter Oborne, and did various bits and bobs. My current position is very exciting indeed.

The comedy has gone jolly well, and I had a great time in Edinburgh (see my entries for August this year). I may not have made a great deal of progess career-wise, but from an artistic standpoint I'm pleased and confident that there HAS been substantial progress. I need to build on this next year. I'm good enough, and I don't want to screw around.

Making my way in comedy is one goal for 2008. Work stuff aside, the other big one is to get fit. It really has to happen this time.

We've got a Presidential election coming up. Well, I suppose WE haven't, but I think of myself as a close friend of the USA, and hope my American friends feel the same. This must be the most unpredictable race in many years.

Oh, and I really should blog more.

And Let There Be Soap And Loo Roll

I have a very different approach to this. I like to go on stage feeling completely empty. I also get ferocious panic wee, and visit the loo so many times immediately before a set that people must think I’m a cokehead.

So prepared, I am able to relax just before going on, but am still psyched.

21st Century Musings

Although I'm certainly not of the view that one should do something purely because one can, and although you dear reader doubtless do such things on a regular basis, there is something rather splendid about blogging from a bus, which I'm doing right now.

Before it becomes commonplace, I'd like to share with you a prediction I made a couple of weeks ago. I'm no psephologist, and right now it's no more than a gut feeling - a hunch, but I think that Barack Obama is going to win the Presidency.

Blogroll

I've just pruned my blogroll. If I've taken you down and you'd like to be put back up, or if you'd like to be put up for the first time, let me know via my email address (see the box at the top of the blog) and I'll consider it.

I know I need to start posting more frequently, by the way.

More Controversy

Yoko Ono isn’t fit to lick Alison Krauss’s boots. Neither – frankly – are any of Led Zeppelin.

Screaming over electric guitars is one thing. Beautiful bluegrass music is quite another.

State Sponsored Bullying

I'm afraid that two staffers at TV Licensing just got the brunt of my displeasure. But then again, they work for an organisation that has sent me a series of outrageously threatening letters, so I won't be losing any sleep over it.

One Richard Goodbody, Regional Manager of the Solent Enforcement Division, is apparently uncontactable by phone. I can't decide if it's worth the effort to send him a letter or not. Perhaps it is, if only to tell him that I consider his frequent missives to constitute harrassment. The latest is headed 'Official Warning', and tells me that: 'Enforcement Officers have been authorised by us to visit your address in xxx to interview you under caution in compliance with the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 or Scottish criminal law.'

No they haven't. They can't enter my premises without a court order, and they can't interview me under caution unless they suspect me of having a television (or other equipment that can receive a TV signal). They would be wrong to so suspect me, as I don't.

I might add that it is preposterous and goes against natural justice to assume that I must be hiding a TV. (According to the bloke I spoke to, 50% of those visited are being mendacious, which he seemed to think justified the approach.) I might further add that the licence fee should be scrapped anyway, but of course that doesn't have any bearing on my case, AS I DON'T HAVE A F-KING TELEVISION.

W-nkers.

500 Not Out

In this, my 500th post, may I place on record a view I hold deeply, that it might be quoted back at me if I am ever foolish enough to seek elected office?

I believe that most of us are expect to pay FAR too much tax.

I am sick to death of being told what my duties to other people are. I am fed up to fury of being told that I should care about 'the vulnerable'. I loathe the prissy way people talk about the NHS and state schools.

I want to see a well-ordered society where a safety net exists to stop chaos and disease, but someone else's mere existence doesn't give them a claim on me. And instead of relying on some backward industry to provide them with a living, children should stop stabbing each other in classrooms and knuckle down to acquiring an education. Oh, and as I've said before, I don't want my own kids to be schooled amongst the thick and idle.

Thanks.