actually, what I should have written was 'Felíz año nuevo!', as opposed to wishing anyone who comes across my blog a Happy New Anus; as I also (accidentally) did in an email sent to several colleagues in an office in Mexico a few years ago.
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I only remembered that particular faux pas recently; in the wee small hours of New Years Day actually. My next door neighbours had clearly dusted off their 'Can’t Sit Down for Six Weeks - Hi NRG Party Mix CD' to entertain their guests; and us. Yes, we all saw 2005 in to the loud strains of Erasure, Pet Shop Boys and Dead or Alive.
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I'm not complaining really. Just because we weren't having a party we didn't expect the rest of the World to follow suit. We had decided to stay in this New Year's Eve with a decent meal, a bottle of reasonable wine and movies. Curiously, ITV decided to mark the transition between 2004 and 2005 by showing The Wickerman; warning viewers beforehand that 'this film contains sexual scenes and pagan rituals', which is the first time I've heard that particular caution on terrestrial British Television.
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We had also agreed that we would spend some of the evening discussing and agreeing personal and shared goals that we would hold ourselves to over the coming year. We didn’t get round to that in the end and the list so far, a couple of days later, contains only two items …
- Make some News Year's resolutions (Both of Us)
- Transform myself into blob of pure energy (Stef)
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It's not that we're overly anti-social it's just that we've done the wander round the centre of London thing quite a few times now, we've gone abroad, we've partied at friends' houses. This year we didn't have the va va voom. We probably should resolve to do something more extrovert and spectacular next New Year's Eve as, by many people's reckoning, there are only seven left.
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Yup, you possibly heard it here first, Armageddon is currently scheduled for 2012; December 21st to be precise. Now that 2000 / 2001 passed without much in the way of terminal catastrophe, the Millennial types out there have settled on this new date. I first heard 2012 mentioned years ago at a fringe lecture given by a man who had spent fifteen years of his life 'staring at Mesoamerican coffin lids until the hidden stories were revealed to him'. Apparently, the Mayan 'Long Count' calendar for this particular version of the World (four out of five) started in 3114BC and ends in 2012AD. Since that lecture I've noticed 2012 gradually sneaking into all sorts of New Age Literature and conspiracy-based web sites. A gradual fusion of ideas from a wide variety of origins has taken place and it is now not uncommon to come across conspiracies along the lines of 'George Bush and his Satanic Masonic Zionist Cabal are conspiring to bring about a global catastrophe to make the World suitable for their Alien Overlords in 2012'.
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The Mayan calendar certainly does run out in 2012, unlike the Mayans themselves who expired a thousand years before that. And you can never be sure can you? Maybe I'll stock up on canned food and shotguns sometime in 2011; if I'm still around and haven’t managed to transform myself into that blob of pure energy.
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An Australian priest was on TV yesterday telling us that the recent tsunami and a couple of chunky volcanic eruptions at the same time are God's warning that we should prepare for the End of Days and Final Judgement. Yup, that's the God we all want to hear about and believe in 'Do what I frickin well tell you or you're toast f*ckers'.
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And is that particular idiot priest suggesting that the tsunami somehow cleverly distinguished between the righteous and the non righteous when it came slamming in?
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To be fair, I do sense that something unpleasant is in store for the World at some point in the next decade or so. There's a curious sense of hopelessness and nihilism in World politics and business today. No-one, and I mean no-one, is offering a vision of a better future. We can choose from a wide-variety of potential agents of World destruction merrily brought to our attention by the media. The lies of politicians and multinationals are becoming more transparent and their behaviour more blatant. But that's another blog.
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Every cloud does have a silver lining though and Armageddon would finally put an end to the annual, way above inflation, increase in UK train and bus prices. After this year's price hikes it now costs me £4.60 to travel three tube stops into town and back again. It would be more palatable if our trains weren't so rubbish but Londoners are in the curious position of simultaneously having the most expensive and worst transport system of any major city. And every year it gets even worse and even more expensive. You really do have to live it to believe it.
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However, I can cushion the effects of the rises by investing in a pre-paid electronic ticket, known as an Oyster Card. It's great system. You charge up the ticket with money and then London Underground deducts a random amount from you whenever you travel. After all, how can you prove that you DIDN'T travel from one of end London to the other six times in one morning?
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Yes, the future is here. It's electronic and there's no way you can prove it's ever wrong. That's progress for you. The same people who brought us the Oyster Card have also brought us other wonderful advances such as 'Chip and PIN' and electronic voting machines in places like Ohio and Florida. In the bad old days, before progress, you could prove someone had fraudulently used your credit card or illegally imposed a psychotic US President on America and the World by demanding to see the signed payment slip or box of voting papers. Forget that old fashioned rubbish, now you can cheerfully have your spleen ripped out through your wallet and read about innocents murdered in your name around the Globe without any hope whatsoever of redress.
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It's interesting to think that the average reality TV show now has more concrete evidence to support its voting results, in the form of phone records, than the US presidential election in certain key states.
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And remember, 'It's all for your convenience' …
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