According to The Daily Telegraph, less than 1 in 10 people stick to their New Year’s resolutions, but this doesn’t stop millions of us from looking back at the triumphs and mistakes of the previous year, and resolving to change for the better. So, in the spirit of misguided optimism, here’s a list of our resolutions based on the hits and misses of 2009.
Happy 2010!
DOs...
Do stop fretting about life after graduation and how to repay your student debt. Instead, apply to be a hotshot journalist. Find a scandalous story that will outrage Daily Mail readers (if not make it up), conduct a successful investigation and leak out tantalising parts of the results everyday in the paper. The MPs’ expenses scandal pushed the Daily Telegraph’s circulation up by more than 600,000 copies. Boost in sales means a pay rise. A sure get rich quick strategy.
Do be Alan Bennett. The playwright, novelist
and National Treasure who has bequeathed his whole set of works to the Bodleian Library, celebrated his 75th birthday this year, and accordingly the BBC commissioned god-knows-how-many programmes about this northern star, each one of them excellent. 2009 also saw the long-awaited premiere of The Habit of Art about the relationship between composer Benjamin Britten and poet W.H. Auden which won rave reviews, and for which tickets are seemingly sold out until next April!
Do shut down your facebook and twitter accounts. Mandelson’s plans to force students to complete three-year degrees in two years means a race against the clock. No time for facebook pokes, stalking of exes and oh-so-meaningful tweets.
Do protest. Oxford student protests over climate change, Gaza and the University’s unethical investments (amongst many others) have not claimed any world-changing successes this year. However, they are a lot of fun, they get otherwise pasty-faced workaholics out of the library and into some proper sunshine and, if you’re lucky, you might be involved in one of the really cool ones, like scaling Didcot power station. (Though perhaps stay away from any protest where the main event is the occupation of Magdalen roundabout. In the rain.) Plus they make you feel less guilty next time you drive to the corner-shop to pick up the paper.
Do put two fingers up to the trendy, moody, thick-rimmed glasses wearing, elitest colossuses of wankerdom who force “edgy”, “cool” and “alternative” plays upon their long-suffering friends by staging a musical, as Alice Hamilton did (West Side Story), at the Playhouse, and packing the 600 seater place to the fucking rafters every single evening. This masterstroke of programming, called by one hard-to-impress reviewer “the second best thing I’ve ever seen in Oxford”, showed that you don’t have to adapt Kafka for mime-artists or stage a puppet show version of Paradise Lost in Latin to win both critical and popular acclaim in this city.
Do be a historian. According to that incredibly scientific study back in Trinity, the Cherwell sex survey, historians have the most sex, and Somerville and New students are the most promiscuous. Also, do be gay. Homosexual students are more likely to get firsts, apparently. However, way too many Oxford students are having unprotected sex, including around half of our survey respondents. If you’re smart enough to get into Oxford, you should be smart enough to find yourself a condom: do use protection!
Do make enthusiastic promises to yourself about the amount of exercise you are going to do this year. Write a jogging timetable. Buy expensive running gear. Eat a diet of only Special K, varied with ‘interesting’ salads and steamed vegetables. Then give it up, two weeks in, safe in the knowledge that 75% of all those who made New Year’s resolutions will give up too.
DON’Ts…
Don’t buy anything by Damien Hirst. Ever. The most noir of my various artistic betes had yet another great year, raking in millions and millions for his mass-produced tat. It’s a shame that away from the circles of Bollinger swilling, Chanel clad, chauffeur-driven cashpoints on legs his reputation as the man responsible for the decline in modern art was cemented this year by an almost universally derided exhibition. He also showed what yobbish prima donna he really is, when he threatened to sue an entrepreneurial 16-year-old who used an image of his diamond-encrusted skull, For the Love of God, to create a collage to sell on the internet.
Don’t write a horridly inaccurate, inconsistent and irrelevant article about something that’s actually pretty amazing, then attempt to soften the edges of your juggernaut-journalism by putting a picture of Henry the Hoover on your front page. When the Ashmolean re-opened, a couple of galleries were still being installed. That’s all. The way OxStu handled this story, one would think that most of the floor was missing, or that builders were still sat around using priceless sarcophagi as tea-tables.
Don’t be a politician. No one likes Gordon Brown, Barack Obama has lost that star quality after a year wrestling with an unruly Congress and even golden boy David ‘Dave’ Cameron was forced to apologise after inexp
licably claiming wisteria removal on his expenses. Apart from Silvio Berlusconi – apparently the man can get away with saying anything. Actually, that’s not quite true… even he was hospitalised after having a souvenir of Milan cathedral thrown at his luminous face.
Don’t start a smear campaign against your peers. The only thing more pathetic than a Union hack using their 15th profile on OxGoss to slag off their competition is the poor student journo taking their posts seriously. OUSU hacks trawled new depths of pettiness last term when Barclay and Leeper’s teams tried to get each other fined every time an Oxford student logged onto facebook during the campaign. And it can all end so terribly, as it did for Ruth Padel after Cherwell reported on a smear campaign against Derek Walcott which forced her rival to withdraw himself from the race for Professor of Poetry. In the end she had to resign over it. Honestly, when will we learn to play nice?
Don’t text if you are doing something you shouldn’t – SMS messages are the ultimate evidence. Tiger Woods must deeply regret his saucy messages to 11 very well endowed white blonde women. Both Gilette and Accenture terminated their advertising contracts and the revelations were December’s topic number one for a dinner party conversation.
Don’t eat at Jamal’s, even when you’ve given up the traditional New Year’s diet. Not unless you’re not expecting to keep the food down very long, i.e. you’re on a crew date. It is one of the many restaurants round Oxford which, despite the Council giving them zero stars out of five in their food hygiene inspection, is being kept open by student trade, much to the annoyance of local residents. Though if you’re at Balliol, you might want to avoid hall food too after their kitchens were revealed to have the worst health and safety report of all Oxford colleges. Others to steer clear of include Mansfield and Pembroke, after a Cherwell investigation threw light on their pest control problems. Domino’s pizza, anyone?
Don’t listen to people who tell you January is depressing. Another year until you have to stress about what to buy/use the ‘what a lovely present’ face/play board games with the extended family. Wahey! Also, no more listening to your mum’s Rod Stewart CD – or if you have parents with even less taste, perhaps it was the dreaded Cliff Richard. Congratulate yourself on another Christmas survived and look forward to the New Year. Besides, it’s almost time to return to the land of Ox, where you don’t have time to be miserable – there is always a friendly essay deadline to look forward to.
Don’t complain about your Collections. We all have them, and you’re making me feel guilty. We all know someone who has been working all holiday while the rest of us lounged around on the sofa for 5 weeks, occasionally flicking through Descartes and planning to think profound thoughts. 0th week is revision week. That’s why it’s called 0th week.
