New Year Nonsense: Tales of a newly-married person in early old age

 Changing Your Life In January

Like many people, I make the same new year resolution every year: eat more healthily, lose weight, get fitter. And every year I reach the following Christmas fatter and more unhealthy than ever.

            They say that doing the same thing repeatedly, but expecting a different outcome, is a sign of, at best, irrational thinking – at worst, madness. So, I must be stark staring bonkers by now.

            Of course, there are people out there who make new year resolutions and then stick to them. There must be armies of smug, self-satisfied people at this moment living off boiled vegetables and steamed fish – running, cycling, swimming and going to the gym on a daily basis – eschewing alcohol in favour of meditation and kale smoothies – helping out at the local food bank – spending an hour or two each day painting, practicing the piano or learning to speak another language.

There are presumably even some who  (unlikely as it may seem) have been working hard on their novels since January 2^nd.

By midsummer, we should see these people everywhere – flat-bellied, firm-thighed, clear-skinned, shiny-haired people, looking happy, healthy and contented as they jog past us down the canal path or take T’ai Chi classes in the park. Smiling people, glowing with the knowledge that, through regular hard toil since the new year, their credit card bills are fully repaid, they’re fluent in Esperanto and, if called upon to perform a Latin American dance routine, they’ll be able to rise to the occasion.

These are the people with will-power, the forward-thinking, those who believe in themselves, who can make a commitment in January in the certain knowledge that they can stick to it for the rest of the year.

The grown-ups, if you like.

Do you actually know any of these people?

I can’t say I do. I know people who’ve always been self-disciplined and forward-thinking, without the need to make a new year resolution out of it. But most people I know are like me – their new year resolutions carry them through the cold post-Christmas weeks on a tidal wave of smug enthusiasm before gradually dissipating in February’s fug of inevitable hopelessness.

New year resolutions are often so unrealistic, aren’t they? When I was a teenager, I used to resolve to do all manner of things that, in retrospect, were quite out of character and unlikely to be maintained for more than a week. These included vowing to return my library books on time, determining that I would rise at six every morning and do an hour of aerobics before breakfast, promising myself that I would play with the dog for an hour every day or that I wouldn’t lose my temper – all things I knew deep down I was inherently unlikely to achieve. It was wishful thinking rather than proper resolution-making.

The experts say you have to resolve to do things that are achievable and won’t end up leaving you feeling like a failure by March. So my resolutions this year are:

1.     I will eat a scone, flapjack or almond croissant only five days out of seven;

2.     I will complete a Silver Sneakers fifteen-minute exercise video for the over-50s maybe once a week, if I feel like it;

3.     I will cut down the amount of time I waste looking at Facebook, ‘researching’ actors I’ve seen in the background of Netflix serials whose faces look familiar, or watching YouTube videos of funny cats, down to, say, six hours a day.

Having a Night Out in your Fifties

 The other problem with new year resolutions is that sometimes they turn out to have disappointing results. One of mine this year was to go to the theatre more often, and so, with this in mind, I bought two tickets for us to see ‘Girl From The North Country’, a critically-acclaimed musical play written and directed by Conor McPherson and featuring the music and lyrics of Bob Dylan. My husband is a massive Dylan fan and it was close to his birthday so it seemed like a great way to get started on this particular resolution.

          We haven’t been to the theatre since before Covid, and theatre seats must have shrunk in the interim (possibly as a money-saving measure), because my seat seemed exceptionally small. We were at the end of a row which meant we had to stand up about six times to allow other members of the audience to get to their seats. I did this in a good-natured way at first, but when a tardy couple arrived just as the show was starting, I gave them the benefit of a very hard stare, which the man definitely spotted because he stumbled and nearly dropped his plastic cup of lager on a woman’s head.

To be honest, despite feeling as if my hips were likely to pull the chair out of its moorings every time I rose to my feet, standing up was a bit of a relief as the woman next to me spent the entire performance (and pre-performance) jiggling her leg up and down roughly in time to the music – her leg was pressed right up against me and, to be honest, I’m not even keen on social hugging with friends so, for me, this was far too intimate a body contact with a stranger.

            We hadn’t had time for an evening meal and my husband was ravenous when we arrived. He bought a tube of Pringles and a family pack of Twirl Bites from the kiosk in the foyer and ate them in the auditorium before the play began. Neither of us has ever, since childhood, eaten more than an occasional interval ice-cream in a theatre auditorium before, and at one point I glanced at him and realized he was still wearing his woollen beanie hat as he scooped sweets into the gap in his beard where his mouth is, with industrial efficiency. He looked like a homeless man I was taking for an outing. But at least he finished the crisps before the performance began.

            What can I say about the play? It has been universally praised by critics and audiences. I like Bob Dylan’s music. The singers were good. Dylan himself had given it his seal of approval. So I feel uncomfortably like the small boy who laughs at the Emperor’s New Clothes as I say this – I thought it was absolutely dreadful. I can hear people baying for my blood even as I type…

Set in 1934, in a run-down Minnesota guesthouse housing misfits and lame ducks, it was cliché-filled sub-Steinbeck gibberish, as far as I could see. There was a landlord who had experienced a tragedy in his childhood which actually made me want to giggle every time it was mentioned (because I’m a heartless bitch, obviously) which made him apparently unable to love anyone. Nevertheless, he seemed to be the most emotionally stable of the characters, and cracked several jokes, all of which seemed too modern for the period and too unoriginal.  There was a couple with an adult child who had ‘the mind of a four year old’ and ‘didn’t know his own strength’. This son had killed or hurt a woman in the past – his father eventually had to kill him and pretend it was an accident (at least this was how I read it). Of Mice and Men anyone?  The landlord’s wife was suffering from alcohol-induced dementia (I only know it was alcohol-induced due to the programme telling me) but, though she talked a lot of incoherent nonsense, she also made some pronouncements that were clearly intended to be profoundly wise. How often does that sort of thing happen in plays, eh? The daughter of the family was pregnant, with a phantom pregnancy according to the doctor, but apparently she turned up with a baby later. Maybe it was meant to suggest the second coming of Christ? There was a subplot which felt straight out of Fiddler On The Roof about an old man, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Lazar Wolf, who wanted to marry this poor nineteen-year-old girl. There was a black boxer who had been – wait for it – imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit – who reminded me very much of a character from Little House On The Prairie. There was even a grifter pretending to be a bible salesman – all he needed was a little girl and it would have been Paper Moon. And I couldn’t see the dramatic point of the son, Eugene, at all.

            The characters intermittently burst into song, for no good reason, though this is a feature of musicals that you have to accept, obviously. I like Bob Dylan’s music, and the auditorium was obviously full of big fans – for instance, the woman who was rubbing her leg up and down mine throughout the performance was singing along at several points too, which added nothing to my enjoyment of the show. However, there should have been more of the more recognizable songs, for the non-‘Dylan fanatics’ in the audience – ‘I want you’, ‘Like a Rollin’ Stone’ and ‘Forever Young’ were there, a little burst of 'Make you feel my love', but most of the rest were unfamiliar to me and sounded dreary and forgettable. I listened to the words of some of them and, though I’m sure this will be considered as sacrilegious as saying you’re not fond of Granny Weatherwax on a Terry Pratchett Facebook page, I was surprised by how dull and predictable the lyrics were – I mean, the man won the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years back, didn’t he? But still, the music was generally good, and the evening would have been vastly more enjoyable had it just used the cast, who were all good singers, singing a selection of Dylan’s best songs, rather than weaving them into this dire play.

            I wasn’t entirely alone in my judgement. The four people in front of us didn’t return after the interval. A friend of my husband who happened to be there the same evening with his family texted him afterwards to say that they thought it was ‘incoherent rubbish’. But the audience gave it a standing ovation at the end and my husband claimed he enjoyed it. Another of his friends has seen it twice, such is his admiration for it.

            Due to the aforementioned hunger, we decided to stop off and grab a burger from KFC on the way home. Neither of us has been to a fast food place for around two decades, except to take my great-nephew to Macdonalds occasionally, and so this was very out-of-character for us. As we pulled into the forecourt, it felt like we were going to have an illicit treat, though it didn’t turn out to be much of a treat in the end. We used the drive-through as the restaurant itself was shut. As it is so long since we went to a KFC, we needed time to look at the menu board – and as our eyesight is so bad, we had to get right up to it before we could see it. So we would have held up the queue, had there been one. Fortunately, there wasn’t. I said I’d have a ‘trilogy box meal’ out of sheer panic. When I asked whether it was intended for one person or more, the question seemed to send the disembodied voice of the girl who took our order into a paroxysm of irritation. When asked what ‘side’ I wanted, not knowing what ‘sides’ they actually did, I blurted out ‘coleslaw’ in a weird voice, and I could feel the girl was thinking ‘Bleedin’ old people!’ as she told us to drive on to the next window. I was disappointed to discover that they only do zinger chicken burgers now. On those odd occasions when I had one, in my younger days, I used to like their straightforward chicken burgers with the colonel’s southern fried spices. The ‘popcorn’ chicken tasted neither like chicken nor popcorn – the closest I can come to describing it would be to ask you to imagine chunks of polystyrene fried in gluey American Tan-coloured breadcrumbs. The fries weren’t really fries but closer to nasty, soft, flavourless chips. There was no ketchup, though we’d asked for it. The burger itself, and the mini fillet, were however pretty good, though the Pepsi Max was hideous, and the coleslaw tasted like it was made primarily of vinegar.

            I was desperate to go to the loo but the restaurant itself was shut so we ate in the car and I staved off the bladder pangs by wriggling a lot and continually banging my foot against the fascia, much to my husband’s consternation. Despite there being numerous parking spots in other places, he felt it was a good idea to park close to a suspiciously anonymous-looking car with its engine running and its lights on. The man in the driver’s seat wore a baseball cap pulled low over his haggard features. He wasn’t eating anything but was talking animatedly on his mobile phone. At one point he got out of the car, walked round it in an aggressive manner, talking on the phone all the while, a cig hanging out of the corner of his mouth, glancing suspiciously at us every now and then, before getting back into the car, slamming the door, and soon afterwards leaving the car park, He was closely followed by three other anonymous-looking cars, each driven by a similar man. Their departure, all coming from different parts of the car-park at the same time and following the first car like a vehicular formation dance team, gave the impression that they had been triggered by the first man’s decision to leave.

Now, he might have simply been some innocent bloke who just needed a brief rest on his journey home from a perfectly legitimate place of work (husband’s interpretation), but to my eyes he looked like a drug-pushing gang-member. And the three baseball-capped men with neck tattoos who followed his car might well have been innocent bystanders who’d just been stopping off in the car park for a quick bargain bucket (husband’s interpretation) rather than other gang members and one undercover police officer, which was my opinion.

And I bet, to them, we looked like a couple of ageing idiots staring blankly at them (well, my husband was) as we munched on our zinger burgers, lettuce falling into our laps, occasionally bickering about whether there were any napkins and if so where were they, the woman wriggling constantly in a weird way….