I am finally ready to jot down my New Year's resolutions. Here they are in no particular order:

Find full time employment (in order to become a productive member of society instead of a dirty, stinking tramp who’s reduced to pilfering economy range cabbage from tesco)

Avoid coming in to contact with anyone that likes Paris Hilton and the like (there’s no need to subject yourself to unashamed stupidity)

Learn to appreciate fine wine (i.e seize every possible opportunity to get drunk)

Meet a lovely, handsome, urbane fellow get married and get a dog (and possibly a few rabbits)

Abstain from supermarket newsstands (an hour spent flicking through Heat and Hello is not a productive way to spend a Saturday morning)

Make use of a dictionary when in contact with an unfamiliar word (before using it in casual conversation and looking like a tit)

Refrain from giving tourists (especially those of American origin) wrong directions

Conquer the fear of venturing out of West London for a night out (even if it takes a crate full of booze to subdue the hysterical sobs of protest)

Make a point of remembering everyone’s birthday (as they are bound to reciprocate (with presents, though to be honest I'd prefer cash))

Resume writing short stories (if only to amuse yourself with how spectacularly illiterate you really are)

Right, I’m off to put resolution number three in to practice.

Till Next Year.

A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936)

What I really wanted for Christmas was one of these:

What I got instead was one of these:

(Next year I shall ask for something I can get, like another useless book I’m never going to read. Bahhhhhhh!)

A stylish, smiling woman in her early forties with impromptu brown curls and sagacious grey eyes reading Hiroshima Mon Amour by Marguerite Duras.

'Was (Immanuel) Kant a cunt?'

We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.

Ford Madox Ford (1873 – 1939)

'You gonna end up walking me down Portobello road on a dog lead just to impress your friends.'

I Would I Might Forget That I Am I

I would I might forget that I am I,
And break the heavy chain that binds me fast,
Whose links about myself my deeds have cast.
What in the body's tomb doth buried lie
Is boundless; 'tis the spirit of the sky,
Lord of the future, guardian of the past,
And soon must forth, to know his own at last.
In his large life to live, I fain would die.
Happy the dumb beast, hungering for food,
But calling not his suffering his own;
Blessed the angel, gazing on all good,
But knowing not he sits upon a throne;
Wretched the mortal, pondering his mood,
And doomed to know his aching heart alone.

George Santayana (1863 – 1952)

The next person who says Merry Christmas to me, I'll kill 'em.
Myrna Loy – The Thin Man

When I woke up I still had my tonsils, but my pocketbook was gone.
Edward Everett Horton – Trouble in Paradise

Let's play a game...Watch, I'll put my hand over my eyes and then you go away...
Cary Grant – Bringing Up Baby

Hey, would you mind putting that gun away; my wife doesn't care, but I'm a very timid fellow.
William Powell – The Thin Man

The more formal the party is, the less you have to wear.
Gene Kelly – An American In Paris

‘A woman must keep her intelligence small and timid to survive. Or she must hide it altogether or hide it through style. Or she must go mad like clockwork to pay for it. She will try to find the nice way to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike. Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligence abhors sentimentality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadfull silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman could not bribe her way with smiles through a day. Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized. Any vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers: but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis and Clark of the female mind. Even restrained intelligence is restrained not because it is timid, as women must be, but because it is cautiously weighing impressions and facts that come to it from an outside that the timid dare not face. A woman must please, and restrained intelligence does not seek to please; it seeks to know through discernment. Intelligence is also ambitious: it always wants more: not more being fucked, not more pregnancy; but more of a bigger world. A woman cannot be ambitious in her own right without also being damned.’

Andrea Dworkin - Right-Wing Women

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.

Willa Cather (1873 – 1947)

'Do you tend to find fishfingers a little disappointing?'

'A riding crop is what you need.'

'You know what stage of the relationship you're at by the clarity of water in your glass.'

Can people stop going on about their marvelous Sunday excursions when I’ve been stuck indoors all day, slogging away on a presentation, three reports and a bloody essay that doesn’t even have a title!!!! Please!!!!!!!

On a lighter note, I’ve been browsing through blogs, whilst taking well deserved breaks, and came across a few that were bloody damn good, a few that were shite, but the good have definitely outweighed the bad this time.

AND you LIED, you LIED, you LIED you LIAR!!!!!!!!!!

Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.

Joseph Conrad (1857 – 1924)