Beware of what you wish for!
Published: 31 December 2022 ~ F*ck New Year Calendars and How do They Work?
Every year, on the 31st of December, most of us, not all but most, celebrate the arrival of a New Year. Some celebrate it quietly, others party like it’s going out of fashion, hopping, whooping, shouting, working themselves up into a right old frenzy as the hours, minutes and seconds count down to midnight. By the time midnight arrives, sobriety has left, and everyone screams ‘Happy New Year’, and then we get more drunk.
As a consequence of this mandatory ritual, typically and ironically for most of us the New Year starts on a none too auspicious note: We fall into bed at 5am and wake up half-way through the day with a bucket for a head, a mouth that tastes like the cat slept in and a guts ~ Well, let’s not draw a picture.
As the last minutes of the last 365 days of our life tick away, you can guarantee that almost everyone around you will breathe a sigh of relief, chorusing “I’m glad to see the back of 1065,” for example, “1066 can’t be any worse!” I think it was Harold who said that.
So it is with philosophical solemnity, that I present to you today, on this last day of the Year of Our Lord 2022, this photograph of a rather rude calendar, which a ferret and I discovered whilst roving the bars of Kaliningrad.
Now we have no way of knowing, and cannot say for certain, if those who hung this calendar on the wall, presumably in January of 2022, were in receipt of psychic information. Did they have a direct line to the Universe’s Control Centre? Was it just a self-fulfilling prophesy? Or is it the work of a ‘double agent’, ie I will denounce 2022 but secretly I support it. In other words, how does this calendar work?
Presumably, like any other, you pin it on the wall on the first day of the New Year to which the calendar applies. Well, OK, making allowances for hangovers, most likely on the second day. But how do you know? How do you predict how the year will pan out for you? What gives you the right and credibility to hang a calendar on your wall that says F!ck 2022, 2024 or 2020-anything?
Does the advocate of this type of calendar have a sixth sense ~ some might argue that they must have a sick sense? Before hanging such a prophetic calendar on his wall, does he consult the tarot cards, examine his crystal balls, believe in horoscopes, resort to numerological mysticism in which 2+2= 6 (which just means his maths are awful) or does he sign up to the endless twaddle that spews out of YouTube videos from self-appointed, self-proclaimed, creepy homespun spiritualists? The mind ~ that is, the mind that is still in control ~ boggles, and shudders, to think.
F*ck New Year Calendars and How do They Work?
Those of you that cling to the adage that pessimism breeds pessimism, ie what goes around comes around, and that bad-joke calendars like this manifest reality, will no doubt recoil in horror at such presumptuous negativity and may even have a calendar on your wall to set the record straight, a calendar, for example, on which it could be written ‘Welcome 2022’, the bold, pink words surrounded by little elves that dance, fairies that flutter, butterflies that bob and rabbits that bunny and bunnies that rabbit, all afrolick together among the softening rays of a sunburst yellow bathed like a halo on the blue-sky background, and they sigh, they sigh with such sighs of optimism that they carry you back like a tune to your childhood and you know instinctively and have no doubt that this, at last, is Your Year!
Looked at objectively and objectionably, It’s hard to decide which of the two calendars surrenders itself more completely to the irony of fate: the bar’s F*uck You calendar or the optimist’s New Era dream, ‘Hoorah! 2023 is going to be the year for me’. (Some woman on YouTube told me so!) Ah, hem …
I don’t wish to be a killjoy, especially on New Year’s Eve, but it must be plain to the most myopic that calendars that purport to predict the essence of the coming year, both the good and the bad, are best to be avoided, or, if the temptation is just too much, try keeping them off your wall, at least until their year is out and the next year safely in.
Let hindsight be your witness and you will minimise the chance of Irony passing judgement on you!
Oh, and a Happy New Year to you all!
Copyright © 2018-2023 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.