In 2024 I’d like to bring back ‘sex maniac’ and forget about 10,000 steps

Alittle late to the party of good intentions, I have decided nonetheless to give the following resolutions a go for 2024.

1 I hope to invent a time machine or an app (an app might be easier) that can perfectly replicate the serotonin rush a viewer of TV drama based on real life events experiences when they see photos of what the people who inspired the drama looked like at the end of the show, but without having to watch the preceding eight hours of dramatised events to get there. Usually accompanied by a line like ‘Andrea served nine years of her life sentence and married the prison pastor’, or ‘David was acquitted of all charges and moved to Columbia’. These are the money shots that surpass anything that has preceded them on screen: if that rush can be achieved without the hassle of watching the programme, the new year would be happier and less frantic. I came up with this idea while wasting seven hours of my life watching Love and Death, incidentally.

2 I would like to stop deliberately choosing the path of most resistance. A peculiar form of cutting off my nose to spite my face, I have always been an awful eejit in this department. When two roads diverge in a wood, I will take the one with the steeper gradient, the more hazardous surface and the stronger likelihood of subsiding into a lake.

The most recent example of this tomfoolery was my decision not to order a new bank card when the chip on mine stopped working, because I suspected that life might be just that bit more difficult if I had no access to cash. And so it has proved. The chip stopped working in August. 3 I want to be less obsessed with the step count app on my phone. For somebody who loves to inform strangers that a) the 10,000 step daily target is a figure plucked from the ether and has no basis in science and b) there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of people choosing walking over more cardio-vascular efficient forms of exercise like cycling or running because walking has a higher step count, I can’t stop looking at the bastard thing and trying to beat my own previous record. Lately, I have been putting my phone in my pocket before I go upstairs to the toilet just so those steps will count. This is insanity and it has to stop.

4 I need to find a better hiding place for my Leap card. Especially when The Boy makes a whistlestop visit home to check in on his dear old mother and disappears with her public transport card when he’s on his way back out again. At least he only takes it to Sandymount: the last time The Small Girl was home she brought it back to London.

5 I’d like to bring the term ‘sex maniac’ back into popular usage in 2024. When I was growing up, it was a fantastic phrase that covered a multitude — from men who wore flared trousers and left the top button of their shirt undone, to anyone who had more than four children. The phrase was particularly popular with mothers and neighbours and for its joyous dismissal of a perfectly healthy interest in sex as a form of mental illness, deserves a second spin on the popularity bus.

6 I think we have probably written enough songs about The Cat now (unless, obviously, there’s an absolute banger begging to be reconditioned as some sort of weird and uplifting tribute to the world’s least humorous animal.)

7 I would very much like to finally be rid of this cold virus that, at time of writing, is 21 days old. The doctor still says that’s within the range of normality, but it occurs to me that the phrase she actually used may have been ‘the new normal’ and because my ears have been stuffed up for three weeks, I misheard. On New Year’s Day, when I developed an unpleasant rash on my face and neck — which, according to the Google medics, can be a symptom of an RSV that usually manifests itself ‘in the final days’ of the virus — I got so excited I knocked over the poinsettia. In any event, I have now used 30 packets of tissues and my face hurts constantly.

It’s a lot, I know. And to be honest, I’ll probably be happy enough if I can just get sex maniac back up and running. May your own successes be at least as modest.