The Merry Month: And a happy New Year
Robert Merry, an independent stone consultant and project manager who ran his own company for 17 years and now also runs training courses on project management, gives his personal slant on the stone industry this month.
I usually have a sense of excitement around the first week of New Year, my head full of initiatives and resolutions, killing off bad habits and forming new.
But not this year.
I wasn’t sure if it was exhaustion from the past six months’ work or my age – been there, done that or (my age again) the early on-set of senile dementia (ie I can’t remember what New Year is – every day’s the same).
I decided the cause was exhaustion, as I don’t like to talk about my age. I’m at that critical point in life where my face is catching up with my years and everything has gone, or is preparing to go, south. It’s not migration, either, as this would imply a return journey in the warmer months. No, this is a permanent move.
Couple that with my son warning me 2013 will be a year of bad luck and I woke up on the 1st of January unable to remember last year and unwilling to contemplate this.
But then someone brought me an indulgent hot chocolate pudding “with a gloriously Guey melting chocolate centre”, according to the packaging. Improbable though it may seem, this lightened my mood immediately and increased my blood sugar level sufficiently for me to raise my head off the pillow and start the year.
In addition to the description of the contents of the pudding, there was also an invocation on the back of the packet: “Pleasure is everything, Give in to Happiness, Reject Propriety: embrace variety, Life is fleeting: clasp it hard with both hands, Seek delight, Trust your impulses, Ordinary is pointless, Break free!”
The last phrase immediately brought to mind an image of Freddie Mercury, dressed in a short skirt and hoovering to the Queen single ‘I want to break free’. Perhaps all he needed to have done was eat an indulgent hot chocolate pudding and he would have been really free. I certainly was.
As a start to 2013 this hedonistic mantra sounded good. ‘Pleasure is everything’; ‘seek delight’; “give in to happiness”. Yep, I can cope with that – I think another hot chocolate pudding is in order. But then ‘embracing variety’. I wondered if they did any other kind of pudding?
Or perhaps I should ‘clasp life with both hands’ and just eat the second one (they conveniently come in packets of two). Seeking delight, the second pudding hardly touched the sides. And, of course, my trusted impulse was to be sick.
Most of the strap lines will have a relevance at some juncture in the coming year. But the one that stuck like a limpet to my ship’s hull of a mind was ‘ordinary is pointless’.
The celebration of the winners of the Natural Stone Awards in the previous edition of this journal recognised those who had realised extraordinary buildings, adorned with beautiful and extraordinary stone.
Congratulations to everyone involved in their creation – for not being ordinary.
To strive to be extraordinary… to make that kind of a difference. That is my starting point for 2013. That and to kick the chocolate pudding habit.
Happy New Year.