Happy New Year one and all!

Can it really be a full year ago since the blog post – Good Intentions? It blooming well is you know. So here’s a quick review of the good intentions and what I achieved (and didn’t) in 2024.

Well, on a personal level I managed to lose the pitiful amount of 8 pounds in weight. Piss poor even if I do say so myself. At one point I’d actually lost over a whole stone but then Christmas came along and buggered all that up. So I’m more or less back to the beginning with that.

I have almost stuck to one of my goals that I set myself of going outside every day and getting some fresh air, rather than moping in the flat on bad days. And I came so close to achieving a full 366 days but for one when I was enjoying time with some visiting friends so much that I actually forgot to go out. I could kick myself for that one.

But in other ways I have been better. For instance, dry January ran into dry February, dry March and almost dry April. I broke my duck on April 28^th whilst out for a meal with the family and sank two pints of delicious, cold Guinness. And I’m trying it again this year. Going dry for a month I mean, not drinking two pints of Guinness, although I probably will drink a lot more than two pints of it before the year is out.

I’ve taken much better care of myself in many ways but my health has deteriorated with the arrival of cervical spondylosis, which is quite literally a pain in the neck. Fibromyalgia has run rampant like wildfire through my entire body and I had a cist the size of Bournemouth on my back at one point that required some pretty intense meds to shift.

So health wise it’s not been too great.

As for the old writing lark, well, that’s been an odd one. This is the first year that I haven’t published a book since 2019, when the wonderful Ah Boy! made its debut. Mind you, I did publish a weekly serialisation of a novel called Take a Hike that I wrote almost twenty years ago, which wasn’t very good to be honest, and doesn’t actually count as canon even though it does reference Ingleby but is set mainly in Whitby and therefore is something of an anomaly. It’s a bit like when Sean Connery made Never Say Never Again. Yes, it kind of was a Bond film with many of the usual elements in it but it just wasn’t officially part of the series. That’s how I look at Take a Hike.

This ‘ere blog has suffered a bit; I have to hold my hands up and admit to that. You see I got distracted by the glamorous lure of Substack. I envisaged that when I started posting in May of last year that I would be in three or four figures of subscribers by now.

That hasn’t been the case.

I’m still in the low double figures.

Then, on October the 18^th, my mum was hospitalised after a fall at home. The next two and half months saw Ange and I travel almost 3500 miles up and down the motorway to go and visit her every Friday to Monday. We slept on an air bed on my mum’s living room floor and I’ll leave you to guess how that has affected me physically.

And I’ll let you in to a little secret…

At one point I nearly quit!

I did. I nearly quit writing altogether. I just didn’t have the heart for it anymore. The horrible truth about being an independent author is that it’s frightfully hard to get people to take a chance on you. You see, if my name were David Walliams or Richard Osman or even Jamie Oliver (shudder) then publishers would be fighting each other to get a six-book contract into my sweaty little palms. But I’m not a celebrity, I’m a nobody, and nobody wants to read a nobody. If that makes sense?

But, I didn’t quit. Thanks to good advice from close family and true friends and the wonderful support of my amazing wife I feel a renewed determination at the start of this year. For one thing, Ange has retired now and I have to re-double my efforts at selling my books. Blessham Hall doesn’t get many tourists you see, and what with all the renovations to the front terrace and the owls nesting in the west wing, I really need to get myself paid for what I do.

Anyway, here’s the thing. I’m not setting myself any goals or resolutions for this year. I’m going to write when I write and not stress out on the days when I don’t. I’ve got plans for an anthology of my non-novel writing and I do hope to get the next Archie and Aggie Stone novel finished. It would be nice to start on the next Blessham book as well, which has a storyline I’m really excited about.

But if it don’t happen it won’t happen, and I need to keep a philosophical outlook.

I’d like to be sat here in 365 days’ time and tell you that I’m many stones lighter and several jeans sizes thinner but I’ll be happy with whatever I lose and if I can answer the front door without getting out of breath and breaking into a sweat by then, then I shall feel like a winner.

2025 – Bring It On!