“Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard; live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel.”
- Mary Schmich (Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young)
...
Earlier on, I was round at a friend’s house, swapping my ability to change lightbulbs and plug in huge televisions for a cup of tea with soya milk. A good time was had by all and the soya milk - sweet and sickly as it was - cleared up my hangover a treat.
I mention this because my friend, aside from being a journalist, is also an avid believer in the strange and curious world of positive thinking. And I have to admit, it’s never really been my cup of (er...) tea - mainly because I’ve found that negative thinking leaves far less room for disappointment.
And yet.
Stuck to her wall above her desk, I noticed, were couple of little handwritten notes. Post-it sized things, and on each was written one of those message to the cosmos things that Noel Edmonds used to (presumably) order his wife to run off with a pilates instructor. These were her goals, and she was asking the universe for help in achieving them.
I’ll be honest - my first instinct was to dismiss the idea of them, in the way that I’d dismiss the idea of ordering a book from Amazon by simply writing its name on my hand and waiting for the postman. But then the horrible realisation hit me. My life - the negative thinking one - is currently quite a bit of a mess. I’m drinking too much, writing too little, eating crap and basically waiting for my new passport to arrive so I can get out of London. In contrast, my friend’s life - the post-it note ordering one - is actually pretty okay. She’s healthy, broadly happy and writing a damn sight more than I am at the moment.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still pretty sure the cosmos is not the place to do your ordering, but I suppose I’m prepared to accept that writing down things you want to change can do wonders for one’s motivation. If it’s written on a little list, and if there’s a deadline attached, then it’s much harder to ignore.
The book is due on January 1st, which is quite a neat deadline. So here’s my short list of things I’m going to do between now and then. Starting obviously with...
1) Write this fucking book. Seriously, I’m going to have to get down a couple of thousand solid, publishable words a day, starting tomorrow. Today.
And then, in not much of a particular order...
2) Stop eating so much shit. Sushi is my new friend.
3) Stop drinking for a while. There are too many parties and too many dinners at the moment where wine and rum are served. I was only half joking when I Facebook statused the other day saying I was waiting for my eyeballs to turn yellow.
4) Decide what the hell I’m going to do this spec script about. I had a great idea last night, but when I woke up this morning, it was shit.
5) Never, ever, drink soya milk again.
And then, the biggie...
6) Get my passport sorted and take Alison’s advice to get out of London for a while. Samuel Johnson once wrote “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for in London there is all that life can afford.” He was half right*. There is all that life can afford, for sure, but there’s also plenty of yin to that particular yang. It’s time for a break.
...
So that’s my list, and my personal challenge for the next month-and-a-bit. It’s Christmas so I can’t promise the food or drink ones, but I’m pretty sure I can limit it to the couple of big Christmas parties I have coming up, and of course New Year. The book, by hook or by crook, will have to be done. And I feel broadly similar about the getting out of London.
I have no clue what’s going to happen about the spec script.
Maybe something will come, maybe something won’t.
We’ll have to see.
But trust me on the soya milk.
...
* Incidentally, doing and writing things by halves is a something of a re-occurring theme for Samuel Johnson. Whenever he’d compose the first draft of a poem, he’d only ever write down the first half of each line. The rest would be added from memory later. Curious fellow, all told.