My first resolution is that I am going to learn French.  My boyfriend took me to France in September, and I was terribly embarrassed by the fact that I was unable to communicate with any of his friends except by inane smiling.  I spent five years at school studying French, and came out of the experience with an A* GCSE and a complete inability to speak it.  Well no, that’s a lie; I can say certain things…

Je m’appelle Radio et j’ai douze ans.  Je porte une jupe bleu marine, une chemise blanches, des chaussures noires et des chaussettes noires. Je n’aime pas les uniformes parce que tout le monde se ressemble et pour les filles porter une cravatte c’est stupide.  Je voudrais être secrétaire.  Je veux travailler dans un bureau avec des ordinateurs. Je ne veux pas être vétérinaire.  Je ne veux pas travailler avec les animaux.  C’est ennuyeux.

That is the sum total of my French.  I hope it impresses you.  It impresses me, actually, that eight years later I am still able to recite without pausing for breath a stack of sentences which I memorised without understanding, but it is unlikely to impress anyone in France.  And so I am going to learn French, so that next time my boyfriend takes me to France I am not such an embarrassment and also so I can eavesdrop more effectively on what people are saying.  It’s very frustrating to know people are talking about you but not be able to understand the words

I already have a vast quantity of books, and an MP3 player with a Michel Thomas course on it, so the only explanation I will have for not being able to speak better French this time next year will be that I am lazy.  I am hoping to make good progress with it in January when I will be working away from home and able to spread all my books out in a hotel room and concentrate.  Learning French at home is problematic, because I don’t want anyone to know I am learning French.  It is, admittedly, a harmless enough pastime, but a curious person might wish to know why I am troubling to learn French, and I cannot think of a satisfactory answer.  To tell the truth, that I have been on holiday to France, is not an option because, as already alluded to, as far as some people are concerned I was in Düsseldorf in September, not Toulouse.

My second resolution is to lose weight.  I just told this to one of my friends and he said “Do you have any to lose?” which was nice of him, but actually I am almost a stone heavier than I was this time last year and so as of yesterday I am on a diet.  Not a diet that will involve much actual dieting, and certainly not one which will require me coming into contact with anything green, but I’m going to stop eating junk food between meals unless it’s a chocolate emergency, and make sure I walk four miles a day.  Losing weight will be greatly beneficial, because my current suit is going to holes and I have a new suit in the wardrobe which I need to be under 8 stone 5 to fit into.  If I could lose about half a stone, that would be perfect

My third resolution is to save money.  I already started off with this one before the New Year, and have set myself up an internet savings account into which I am going to transfer £500 a month.  I got a nasty shock a while ago when I realised I was spending as much as I earned, and so I have carried out a thorough review of my finances, including changing both my mobile phone tariffs to cheaper ones and resolving to keep careful track of the cash I spend.  At the end of each month I’m going to transfer anything I have left in my current account over to the savings account, and the hope is that I’ll soon (well, soon in a relatively long term sense of the word soon) have enough for a deposit on a house.  I might just about be able to scrape together a house deposit at the moment, but possibly not, and that would absorb every last penny I possess, which isn’t a sensible thing to do if you’re buying a house.  Houses need decorating and furnishing, and because unfortunately circumstances mean that I won’t be able to coordinate buying a house with getting married, I will have to buy all the furniture and appliances myself.  If I were going to get married people would buy me washing machines and tables and towels which would all be rather helpful, but that is not, I suppose, an argument to justify marriage :(  Hence my savings account.  It has just occurred to me that I could do interesting calculations about how many bars of chocolate I need to not eat until I can afford a washing machine, but perhaps that would be a bit sad

My fourth resolution is to learn to drive.  I really need to be able to drive for my job but haven’t learnt yet for a combination of reasons; not being well enough, being too busy and being too scared.  This is going to be the year when I start, although I may leave it until February.  I am trying to console myself that there are a lot of people I know who are quite stupid and yet perfectly well able to drive, but I am so terribly clumsy that I still have grave doubts about my own abilities.  This is another reason why I need to save lots of money; driving is expensive :(  Luckily, I have actually just got a pay rise

I have various other resolutions which aren’t important enough to merit their own numbers.  I need to be more conscientious at work, because it is probable that I will be staying at work longer than I once intended to.  Well, I intended to have left work several weeks ago when I failed my exams.  I want to become more confident and not so reluctant to talk to people, and possibly a bit more truthful towards certain members of my family.  I can see there would be advantages to having a life which is simpler than mine

How many of these things I will achieve is debatable, but I hope by writing them in public I will be somehow shamed out of deviating from them for fear of people asking me how I am getting on…

I have decided not to buy a paper diary by the way. I had a quick flick through last year’s diary yesterday, and it didn’t make very cheerful reading. Bizarrely, the first entry of 2007 ended with me asking God for the strength to cope with the year. I say bizarrely because I can’t imagine writing something like that now and I am curious about at what point I changed from being a person who could write that sort of thing to a person who could not.

And what a year it has been!  Some days I feel it has been the best year of my life, other days I feel it has been the worst, and perhaps ultimately all I can conclude with surety is that it has been the strangest.  It has been a year of firsts for me.  The first time I have been abroad on my own, the first time I have called in sick to work for dubious reasons, the first time I have drunk five glasses of wine in one evening.  It was the first time I have been in charge of a company audit, and the first time I have ever eaten a kebab.  It has been a year when I have done the craziest things, and there have been points throughout it, perhaps whilst wandering round the back streets of Düsseldorf in the dead of night without anybody knowing where I was, or sitting in a pub in Essex and maintaining a conversation about wedding planners with a colleague whilst pretending the guy sitting a few tables away was a complete stranger as opposed to someone I had secreted in my room, when I have stopped for a moment and thought, “How the bloody hell did I end up doing this?!”.

It has been a year which has in some ways been dominated by the start of a new relationship.  A relationship so special to me that every morning I wake up and am amazed that it exists.  Even eleven months on, I haven’t quite succeeded in believing that this isn’t all some life-like dream which could burst at any minute if I pinch myself too hard.  It is very far removed from a fairytale romance, and perhaps to other people it would not make a terribly impressive story at all, but to me it still seems too good to be true.  Despite all the superficial wrongness which might seem apparent to the casual observer, to me it feels incredibly right.  With my previous boyfriend, the idea of settling down was something which made me feel sick and trapped, an ordeal which I was constantly steeling myself to go through with.  With this boyfriend, however, it feels so unexpectedly natural that I can almost begin to understand why people want to buy houses, get married, have children.

It has been a year in which I have learnt a lot, both about myself and about the world.  I have learnt that to be more positive about my own capabilities.  I have learnt that if you want something badly enough, you should never let dignity prevent you from fighting for it as hard as you can, and not give up unless you are certain that there is nothing else you can physically do.  Less profoundly, I have learnt how to decline French regular verbs in the present tense

It has been a year in which I have become far more confident than I could ever have imagined.  I still lag far behind other people in the confidence stakes, of course, but by my own personal standards I have improved tremendously, and it is really quite a rare thing now for me to be visibly shaking through fear.  I have learnt to defend myself just a little bit more when people are criticising me for things I don’t consider myself to be guilty of.  Learning to believe in myself is something which it will take more than twelve months to accomplish, but I think I have made significant progress recently.  I have learnt to accept that even if I can’t quite believe something is real, can’t fathom why someone as wonderful as my boyfriend would want to be going out with me or something similar, if that thing appears real then it is real until there is substantial evidence to the contrary.  I have learnt not to assume the worse, that people do not necessarily have to be drunk to say the things they mean or mean the things they say and, more importantly, that refusing to believe in reality is the surest way to bring about the cessation in the existence of the said reality.  I have learnt that life does not have to be regarded as a mathematical proposition, in which it is not possible to trust without a comprehensive proof, and that it is perhaps better to approach life like a physicist, who bases his decisions on circumstances which he does not understand the reasons for, without finding that fact concerning.

These are not things which I have learned as quickly as I probably should have done, but I am getting there in the end, and hopefully that is the main thing.  Some of it, in fact, only came to me relatively recently.  Looking through conversations which had taken place pretty much this time last year, it struck me with some force quite how much has changed in twelve months and suddenly I felt rather silly, nay incredibly silly, for some of the things I had been thinking and worrying about, and for the shadowy doubts, both expressed and unexpressed, which I had been harbouring somewhere in my hidden depths.

For those, if Babel is reading this (and I suspect he will because he’s a nosy bugger  ) and various other episodes of the last twelve months which can be read between these lines, I apologise.  My hope for the next twelve months is that they will run a bit smoother.  To a certain extent that depends on circumstances outside of my control, but as far as the circumstances inside my control go, there are a lot of failings which I have been guilty of during 2007 which I hope not to be so guilty of in 2008.  I am a much more secure, independent and confident person than I was twelve months ago, and I don’t think there is much doubt what I have to thank for that.

It might be overambitious to say this was the year in which I grew up, but I hope it is the year in which I have started.