The last Diary of the year; and before we proceed any further, can someone please tell me what happened to the year 2000? It vanished as quickly a mouse as you open the pantry door, fleetingly present and more fleetly gone. So we are left with a mere residue of a memory of a year when grey month mingled with grey month, as seamlessly as fogbank meets fogbank, and mist mixes with mist. Where did it go? It was there one moment, and gone the next, and gone for ever.
Does it not fill you with the sort of trembling terror you experience when you peer out of the aircraft window and see rivets popping out the wing, flames from the engine - and look, there goes the pilot under the wing, waving farewell as his parachute opens? For all that lies between now and your death are units of time such as that oh most trifling unit of time that has passed over the scales since you saw the last new year in. Maybe not even a single unit. If more, you know how substantial that unit is: how much really more substantial are 10, 20, 30, even 50 such units?
Grim Reaper
Time to prepare for the Grim Reaper, by ensuring that God is permanently in your debt. Having 10 New Year's resolutions is perfectly useless, because you know you'll never keep them. What you want is one New Year's resolution which is easy of accomplishment, and which will put Him forever in your debt, so when the hour cometh, you may wingeth your way into heaven, to sitteth at the right hand of the Father.
Here is the One Resolution. Clean out the deep freeze. In the permadark and in the permafrost, new life-forms have probably formed from the isolated pea which has been mutating since it was lost there 20 years ago, from the fragments of chicken nugget that hid amid ancient frozen fur, from the withered, gnarled fish finger that went missing in 1979.
As you thaw out the frozen debris-soup, you are creating the equivalent of the primeval slime out of which the first proto-viruses crawled at the beginning of creation. From the nuclei of fish-finger genes, and pea DNA, and this single kernel of sweetcorn, we can start to assemble the building blocks of life. God will be pleased. It means he can have another bash, and maybe this time not make such a unholy mess to start with.
And that's it. That's your resolution. Swill out the contents into a bucket of warm water, and put that in the garden shed, and wait. After a few archaeological epochs, and a billion years or two, with some godly guidance here and a little creative nudge there as the Cambrian measures are freshly laid, he'll restart the human story with Eve, feeling lonely as she wanders around Eden in her nip, and yearning in her quiet, undemonstrative way for an Adam.
New world
By that time, you'll be safely ensconced in heaven, and you can watch the new world that has emerged from your deep freeze. Look - there are men discussing their emotions. How wonderful! And see, these other men exchanging gifts of make-up and small items of clothing, and shrieking with pleasure as they finger each item, and see how they watch and give guidance as one tries this eye-liner here, a touch of foundation there. Listen to how they discuss food, especially puddings and desserts and chocolate. Observe their manly cries of delight as they describe naughty treats they think are yummy.
Look at the women - poor creatures, not in touch with their feelings at all. Their conversations are about hardware, and sport, and business: they form hierarchies, with clear leaders, who command obedience and organise their groups around tasks. So different from the men, who make friends so much more easily - though, to be sure, they are capable of a certain calculated spite. Men's brains can deal with several different mental tasks simultaneously, but their powers of focus seem to be less powerful. In no society are there major men painters, philosophers, composers, sculptors, engineers, designers, mathematicians or chess players, though oddly enough, if you subtract male writers from the English novel, it suffers a catastrophic and irreplacable loss.
First time
There are some things that many men do regularly, such as reversing cars, or shopping at supermarkets, which they do each time as if it is the first time. See how they inch backwards with infinite hesitancy through a space wide enough to reverse the Stena Sealink. See how they wait until the check-out boy has completed scanning his purchases and announces how much they owe before they begin to rummage around in their capacious bags for their purses, completely taken unawares by the request for money.
But just look at the women! See their aggression! Without women, you have safe streets and empty prisons, thought to be sure, you might not have street lighting or buildings of any kind. But nor would you have bombers or rape or armies mutilating children, and how much happier the world would be. So is it surprising that a men's liberation movement swept the world, and that everywhere shops carried books excoriating the female sex, with titles such as All Women are Bitches?
This is the future which lies in your deep-freeze, amid pea and sweetcorn and ancient fish-finger, awaiting liberation. Go to it, and Happy New Year.