The first resolution is to see one of these.

Aren’t they just the freakiest looking fish ever?

You can snorkel with them in June/July on the Isle of Man. Which makes this resolution a sub-category of one of my main resolutions: lots of staycations.

(I know the Isle of Man isn’t technically a staycation but it’s more of one than a trip to Turkey.)

For those who don’t know, staycation is the current buzzword for credit crunchy domestic travel typically undertaken because a weak pound and job insecurity makes spending two weeks in the Alps or whatever a little risky.

The other resolutions are

• Get good at regional cooking/food selection. Britain being the principal region… Followed by Europe.
• Match my knowledge of New Zealand wine with a similarly detailed knowledge of Frog wine. This one might have to stay on the resolution list for a few years running. Or even every new year I ever have.

I trust everyone had an excellent time wherever you were.

We (being Leon, Monique, James and I) were across the road at the local being slurred at by a drunk Bristolean until about quarter to midnight.

I’m sick and it was below zero so we decided to ring in the new year inside in the warmth.

Or so went the plan.

We cross the road to find that every fire alarm in the building was going off and all our neighbours standing outside in the car park.

After quickly making sure neither of our apartments were actually on fire we joined them.

It turns out the fire brigade had already turned up, assessed there was no fire and then left without making an effort to assist in switching off the alarm.

Thus commenced more than an hour of James and Monique ringing various landlords, call centres, management companies, etc at the single worst time of the year to try and get a hold of anybody in an attempt to reach somebody who knew the disarm code.

In all the hubbub we missed midnight entirely and only worked out that it was 2009 when we started hearing fireworks. So I guess that was 2008’s final little “fuck you” from the worst year of my life so far.

Other things we learned whilst standing outside in the subzero temperatures shouting over the shrieking alarm were that our upstairs neighbours are a czech/german couple who are in Bristol because they are avid rock climbers and Bristol has a gorge.

That seems like an arbitrary reason to me and I pointed this out but they were similarly unsatisfied with all our reasons for being here as well… And we had traveled further.

Speaking of… Here is a self-photo from our recent trip to Glastonbury. We went via Weston-super-Mare which means I finally got to see the Atlantic after spending four months living in a country surrounded by it.

I have been trying all day to upload the rest to Facebook but the shitass server is down.

Whatever. They’ll be up by the time you read this.

There are also going to be pictures of Tam’s visit to Bristol and other miscellanea. Life has been too frantic to worry about consistency in personal media.

I am assuming I will find some time in the next few days to cut the video together. Photos must suffice for now.