The Year Gone By

November 25, 2014 by Ray Morgan

This time of year always makes you reflect.

As soon as the Coca-Cola ad comes on and Slade accompanies you as you haul on an ill-advised peplum dress in a sweaty changing room, you naturally start to think of the year gone by.

Endings, despite being followed swiftly by beginnings, are always strange affairs. We're on a constant cycle, yet December marks the abrupt finish to a year and everyone seems to say "I don't know where this year has gone!" while stuffing Body Shop gift sets into bags for life and fretting over the fact that they just couldn't find the time to MAKE gift tags this year.

It puts you in a panicked frame of mind when all magazines and crappy Channel 5 clips-shows start reviewing a year that isn't even over yet (a bit like I'm doing here, whoops).

How do you mark a year? I think about achievements: personal goals, work wins, everything from perfecting the ultimate flapjack to learning how to rebrand an entire company. I turned 30 and didn't vomit in public (or behind closed doors come to think of it): hooray! I completed a lot of sweary cross-stitch projects, excellent. I'm diligently working on a novel - finally - and it's not as scary as I thought.

I bought a juicer AND ACTUALLY USED IT. Like, more than once. My apple, melon and carrot juice is something of a weekend speciality.

I went to a festival and danced in the woods, drank out of a coconut and did karaoke with a live band.

I bought records from my local record shops instead of ordering them off Amazon, and it felt great, especially when I discovered one of them has a LOYALTY CARD. Dangerous news.

I carried Rossi's ice-cream all the way to Peckham on the hottest day of the year in an ice-box for my friend's 50th birthday and it didn't melt!

I got into wine, thanks to Vino Vero independent wine shop, and launched my own obsession with their Bulgarian Soli Pinot Noir. 

Overall, it's been a cracker. I've made new friends, got sh*t done, and crammed as much into my once-empty 2014 diary as humanly possible - perhaps a bit *too* much at times. As with each year that goes by, there have been ups and downs but I hope everyone reading this can look back at 2014 and think yeah, you know what? It was tough at times, but I smashed it. And if you didn't do as much as you'd hoped, fear not: there's a brand new year just around the corner waiting to be filled.

My top 5 things about new beginnings:

1. Best intentions (see previous blog about my exercise bike)

2. Fresh notebooks, waiting to be written in

3. Being able to buy things you'd coveted in November for half the price in January

4. Planning fun weekends for the year to come

5. A whole year of making top 5s stretching ahead of me...