A New Year’s gift: a chance to learn from my mistakes
The best I can offer my readers is the chance to learn from my mistakes in 2018.
Actually, I can do better than that. Learn from my mistakes in January 2019, in that blank week after Christmas and New Year’s when the year stretches ahead like the Trans Mountain pipeline extension, long, dark and still hollow, yearning for bitumen to spill, for which Albertans will be smitten by their coastal countrymen. 1. Avoid viruses, bacteria and spores. I came down with a disfiguring rash, the details over which I will draw a veil, but I had to wear white cotton gloves to stop clawing at my eyes, which were on fire. Then it spread down my neck and onto my right arm and leg, so I was thinking “allergy.”
Can one be allergic to Peppa Pig plastic toys? Possibly, but surely not worthy gifts like sustainable wooden alphabet blocks. We bought a plastic Christmas tree last year. God knows what its distant Chinese maker had sprayed on it, but its 1,000 mini-bulbs went wiggly in December so we did some cord artistry.
To judge by my laptop screen, which is smeared with Christmas cake, Prosecco and bits of old tangerine, it could have been something I ate with my right hand and touched my neck in passing as I lay on the couch binge-watching Bodyguard straight through on New Year’s Day. I am a person without repose.
Anyway, I couldn’t leave the house unless covered in stage makeup or swaddled, so I watched thrillers, shopped online and hung out. 2. Always prep before home repairs. I never assemble my tools with care and thought — and won’t in the future — so my plan to reupholster a desk chair went badly wrong. I casually cut the unsuitably fragile fabric, only noticing when the embroidered palm trees were pointing sideways on the chair.
All I needed was staples. I have two staple guns — and three glue guns for some reason — but the staples didn’t fit either the heavy-duty Mastercraft 57-7345-6 or the smaller Arrow JT-21, and forget the red Swingline from Office Space.
Ever-conscious of alarming Canadian Tire shoppers, I ordered quarter-inch staples shipped by Amazon from their home factory in Campbellville, Ky., forgetting to specify that I wanted them as a group, not separately. They lay in broken grey jagged heaps like Mount Edith Cavell. They didn’t fit.
Perhaps I will glue the chair. Glue doesn’t come in sizes, it melts. Any idiot can glue a chair, just as any idiot can electrify a dud tree, and any idiot can forget to hand out a Santa stocking.
3. Keep track of Santa stockings. Adults can come up with a plausible reason for losing them: Santa was tired so he put them behind the fireplace logs while he had his cookies and milk, right? But why is Santa’s handwriting so familiar? And the Christmas wrap, too? Get your story straight. You don’t want to do a Trump on a small child. Santa is a central belief. He is not marginal. Got that?
4. Don’t shop at night. Your emotional defences are down and you are not at your best mental-wise. I bought a draped satin Joseph T-shirt from the United Kingdom (as they still so sweetly call it) even though I prefer to wear men’s cotton waffle-weave, more anthracite pants, a horrible lichenlike felt Soyer overcoat that weighed more than I do, a green velvet blazer because a woman I admire wears one and I aim to steal her look, the wrong-sized hand towels, these fabulous Pas de Rouge boots on Yoox for like a buck fifty, 57 orders from Amazon including a biography of blood, a history of shipping, a second Yard Sentinel sound machine to repel raccoons, finger splints, moth traps, a towel bar, a bad alarm clock, a good alarm clock, every book published on Donald in 2018 and a $9 harmonica from DillyDally in Vancouver that was the hit of Christmas morning.
It is a mini-bio of 2018 and what a sorry thing it is. 5. Do not have your iPad brought to your bed with your coffee. Leap out of bed and face each fine new Canadian day! Yes, do that.
We bought a plastic Christmas tree last year. God knows what its distant Chinese maker had sprayed on it