At this time of the year, the internet becomes flooded with articles reviewing the previous year’s events. These articles range from individual accounts documenting ‘Mr Tiddles’ first year as a member of the Johnstone family, to news websites explaining how the riots changed EVERYTHING! Alongside these articles, there are a collection of ‘new years resolution’ articles that are usually written by sad people with nothing better to do. People like me. They are brimming with good intention and excitement, detailing all of the things that the writer is going to change about their life at the instant the clock strikes twelve. Normally these are followed by the obligatory ‘day I failed’ article a few days later.
I will admit that I am one of these folk who feels compelled to write every day and can think of nothing better to scrawl than the miserable detail of my own insignificant existence. But someone did once say ‘write what you know’ and in my case that is basically whatever is six inches in front of my nose at the time.
But despite being probably the best year of my life, I will forego the ‘review of 2011’. Furthermore, I will not try to kid myself or anyone else into thinking that I can stick to any self-imposed ‘resolution’ for anything even close to 365 days. Instead, I’m choosing to write a year in advance, in order to take a look at the next twelve months of my life pre-retrospectively. Enjoy the utter ridiculousness of my train of thought.
January 2012
In January, nothing much changed at all. I continued to live and work at Bali Eco Stay, teaching and coaching football down at the local school. I began to make a concerted effort to learn my own unique mix of the Indonesian and English languages. By the end of the month I was able to describe my family, say the days of the week and order durian flavoured condoms at the supermarket, but no one could understand. I began to feel as if Englonesian might not be the functional language I had imagined it to be.
February 2012
I was rather shocked to learn that the Englonesian language had been adopted by the three surrounding villages and was evolving all by itself. The most notable developments included the eradication of the full-stop, the inclusion of twenty three different words for ‘durian’ and the use of the word ‘Ric’ as an undefined conjunction.
It became clear this month that one of the children at the local school, ‘Little Alf’, had a particular talent for football. After numerous phone calls to European clubs and visits to the village by thirteen head scouts, the wonder-kid chose to snub Manchester United, Barcelona and Real Madrid in favour of FC Triesen from Liechtenstein. When asked about his choice, he cited the club’s offer to pay for contemporary dance tuition as the main reason.
March 2012
March marked my final month in the mountains of Bali as I embarked on my trip home to Blighty via Kuala Lumpur and Paris. The tears cried by the locals, whom I had befriended over the five months of my stay, carved a new river down the southern slopes of Mount Batukaru in which a brand new species of otter was discovered. Nicknamed ‘The Savage’ by locals, the beast was distinctive for it’s mop-like golden hair and distinctive beak.
Much to my surprise, I found that Englonesian was made the official language of the International Civil Aviation Organisation. Across the globe, airports and airlines began to exercise the exclusive use of Englonesian in their activities. This proved somewhat confusing for the majority of passengers as the language remained little known outside of the air transport industry.
April 2012
Having chosen to settle in London for the year in order to ensure that everything went smoothly at the Olympics, I set about finding work in April. I was lucky enough to secure accommodation after only three nights of sleeping rough thanks to kind nature of the hostess at the local burlesque house. She agreed that in exchange for aiding with costume changes, I would be given a bed and three meals a day in the rooms upstairs. Following three hours of intense negotiations, a compromise was met whereby I was able to take a lead role in the removing of old costumes, but was excused from the re-dressing of performers on account of my moral objections.
May 2012
My stay at the burlesque house lasted only a little over one month as I was forced to leave after accusations of sexual harassment. I simply found it extremely unprofessional and difficult to be taken seriously in my work when I was constantly having to deflect the advances of the girls there. Once more, the tears flowed plentifully from the eyes of those who I was leaving. It is little known that this was the root cause of the inexplicable flash floods seen across London.
I used the time off in order to take a short holiday to Antigua with my family in order to celebrate my parents’ sixtieth birthdays. During the trip, I was surprised to find a durian plantation on the island. Whilst taking a guided tour, a single fruit fell from the tree and in a moment of Newtonian brilliance, a revelation flashed before my eyes. I realised later that this flash was in fact the blood spewing from the significant hole in my head and it was soon replaced by the flashing lights of the ambulance.
Finland’s surprise decision to drop the Euro as a currency in favour of using empty beer cans caused shock waves throughout the EU and made thousands of tramps into millionaires overnight.
June 2012
By June, I had begun work on my first novel, entitled ‘Oh Ham!’. Using the cash reward that I had earned from the discovery of the illegal durian farm, I settled into a box room and closed myself away for exactly one month in order to complete the work. My landlady, Mrs Johnstone, kept me fed and watered, whilst devoting the rest of her time to the care of her monstrous cat ‘Mr Tiddles’.
My time locked away caused me to miss the mass brawls in the European parliament. When I am old and my hair has inexplicably begun to grow in order for me to become grey, I am afraid that I shall have to say that I missed the night when Angela Merkel dished out a right hook to Sarkozy and David Cameron ran through Brussels in his true blue underpants, burning fistfuls of Euro bank notes.
July – August 2012
Having completed my novel in perfect Englonesian, I set all of my energy towards ensuring that the Olympic Games were a complete success. I had secured a job as a volunteer over a year before the Games were due to start and had prepared myself accordingly. Despite originally being placed at the handball venue, I was transferred late to the athletics stadium as there was a severe shortage of volunteers. Only a week prior to the Games, ‘Oh Ham!’ had been released and millions of people had begun attending Englonesian classes in order that they could read it. This included over half of the Olympic volunteers, most of the spectators and a good number of the athletes themselves. In order to entice the fans back to the stadiums, the IOC took emergency measures to include Englonesian as one of it’s official languages and distributed free copies of ‘Oh Ham!’ to everyone at the stadiums.
The upshot of my relocation to the athletics events was my participation in the 100 metres final. Having been asked to hold on to Usain Bolt’s pet cheetah during the race, I was momentarily distracted by the amusing rhyme written on the back of Tyson Gay’s running vest. Seeing a spectator at the far end of the stadium cracking open a fresh durian fruit, the cheetah began struggling against my weakening grip. As I chuckled like a schoolboy, and at the instant the gun went off, the cheetah leapt from my arms and began making it’s way up lane number eight, which had been left vacant by a French athlete who had been deemed to have ‘illegal equipment’ when he tried to smuggle a baguette in his shorts. Naturally, I tore down the track after the escaped animal, catching him just after the finish line, in time to welcome all the athletes who followed me over. The IOC deemed it perfectly legal and I was given the gold medal.
Disappointingly the Games were overshadowed by the boycott held by every nation in the European Union except for the French, who forgot that they had agreed not to go. This caused waves throughout the EU, but raised hopes at home for even more British medal winners. These hopes were dashed by the Honduran team, who took the world by storm to win 90% of the medals on offer.
September 2012
My Olympic triumph transformed me into a sporting celebrity overnight. The combination of sporting prowess and the sheer ridiculousness of my feat touched the hearts of the entire nation. I appeared on a special ‘Olympic Champions’ edition of A Question of Sport and, along with Jessica Ennis, led Phil Tuffnell”s team to an astounding whitewash over Matt Dawson’s pathetic collection of sailors and rowers. My performance on the show caught the attention of noted academics, who deemed it appropriate to award me a professorship in sports history and the durian fruit. The beautiful Jessica accompanied me to the graduation ceremony and proposed marriage shortly after.
October 2012
Turning Jessica down was an extremely tough decision, but in reality I had no other choice. Celebrity did not suit me, so I retired to a small village in the foothills of the Costa Rican mountains in order to establish my own university. Having written the curriculum in Englonesian, which had now become the most spoken language in the world, I welcomed my first crop of students at the end of October. Subjects included Ukulele, Englonesian 101, the life and times of Vince Cable, Advanced Englonesian, Gecko capture techniques, three hundred uses for the durian fruit and the Hokey Cokey.
I was rather surprised to welcome ‘Little Alf’ to the University after his career as a footballer had stumbled due to his constant desire to use the ball in order to demonstrate the complexities of the meaning of life through the medium of dance. He thrived in Hokey Cokey class.
I finally finished reading ‘War and Peace’ this month, only a year after I began reading it.
November 2012
As the fallout from the catastrophic failure of the Olympic Games hit the British economy, I was called by the government to return to the UK to offer my assistance. With the country in turmoil, my solution to grant independence to Wales and aid them in the formation of an anarchic society proved challenging until the giant scissors that were used to cut the country away from England were shipped from Sheffield. It is still not fully understood where Wales has floated away to, but there was a reported sighting somewhere off the coast of Fiji.
The scandal behind the Honduran genetically engineered Olympic team came to light and the IOC took the drastic decision to erase any trace of the London Games from the history books. I lost my gold medal.
December 2012
Which brings the year to a close. This month has perhaps been the most eventful of them all. The adoption of Englonesian as the standard universal language for the entire planet has had many successes. The most significant of these was the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and it’s subsequent labelling as the biggest case of misunderstanding through language since Hitler received ‘an invite to dinner’ in Poland. Furthermore, the outlawing of the durian in public places has meant that a black market trade has opened up across Britain. It is this market that is currently keeping the country afloat.
The year has been a roller coaster ride from start to finish. Like all good (and awful) stories, you just couldn’t have made it up.
The Badgerwolf 