Hilltops and Swedish Furniture
The new year began with a bang when Tam and I saw in 2008 from up a hill in Ramsbottom. It made a change from paying £15 to stand in a dangerously overcrowded city centre bar with a roomful of angry drunkards, which these days appeals about as much as a shard of glass to the eye. Why I used to do it is a mystery. Why thousands still do is more mysterious still. Last night driving home we counted three couples screaming at each other outside horrifically packed bars. And it didn’t look like they were shouting “happy new year.” Those are hard yards I am gladly doing without.
The hill thing was absolutely great though, and not just because I avoided getting blasted at twice the normal price surrounded by awful strangers and taking the pain out on Tam. I had been unsure of the plan, truth be told, and imagined us stood shivering by the roadside counting down the seconds not until midnight itself but until sufficient time had elapsed post midnight for us to return to our car and go to bed without losing all of our pride.
In the end it was brilliant! A clear night meant we could see out over Bury all the way to the centre of Manchester, and as midnight rolled around, ten thousand fireworks lit up the sky in the type of show we’d have to have gone to Disneyworld to see any other time. Ten minutes of communal joy and wonderful lights brightening up the night sky all over the city. Glorious. I’d not seen anything like it before. The scale of the show was breathtaking.
I’d recommend it to anyone, especially if you want to combine romance with cheapskatery, which I always do. Remarkably, only about half a dozen other people had the same idea as us, despite it clearly being the best place for miles around to see in the new year.
The perfect way to see in 2008.
Unfortunately, shiny new experiences don’t last long. Today has been spent in alarmingly premature middle-aged cosy domesticity, trooping round IKEA looking at stuff we might get for the new house. Stuff we might get. We don’t have the house yet, so we can’t actually buy anything. But there we were all the same.
I never thought I would be so bewildered by wardrobes, and yet here I am utterly befuddled by the array on offer. Should I rejoice that we live in a time and place where every storage solution conceivable is on offer in flat-packed form and with a dozen meatballs for £1.99 at the end? Or should I just go with my gut feelings and curl up into a ball grunting out obscenities until I’m carted away from it all?
Whatever I choose, I know that facing the furniture is, in the end, unavoidable. The looming spectre of a house-move is now just weeks away. And I will have to tackle IKEA head on again shortly, with no chance of escaping the horror inside.
God help me.
Rick
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