Two For One

There are, in my life, staggeringly few times when I wish I understood cricket. Cricket, as far as I can tell, is one of those human activities that could be manifestly improved by the addition of live hand grenades.

Like Pass The Parcel.

But just ever so occasionally, a cricket reference is appalingly called-for, rather saving it from the confines of Hell or Room 101, to which I would otherwise be entirely delighted to consign it.

Occasions like today.
Because today is the one-week marker of the Year of Living Beeblebrox. It has been pointed out to me that to do 42 specific things, within the space of a year, means achieving one a week for very much of the year, with just ten weeks' leeway to not have achieved any of them.

And so there's a certain smug pleasure in accouncing that in Week 1, both Sian and I can claim to have crossed two items off our respective lists. That means we're two for one, not out.

She, I happen to know, has begun making her charitable donations, setting up a regular payment. She's also baked her first, and really rather fine-looking Battenburg. Two down, 40 to go, and hoorah say all of us.

I on the other hand have spoken in public, last Friday, and yesterday, I made an appointment to get back to my regular blood donation schedule. Technically, if you want to suck the joy out of life (and frankly, who doesn't), I won't actually achieve this till November 4th, which is when the next mobile blood donation unit turns up in my town. But the appointment's made, the lift is booked, and to paraphrase many a B-movie sci-fi villain, "Nothing can stop me now! Bwahahahahahaaaaaaa!"

As one week of the 52 in your standard year has passed without me using social media or having chain store coffee, I feel I'm entitled to claim I've got 1/52th of Items 1 and 2 done. And as at my weigh in this morning, I was half a pound lighter than last Tuesday, at 17st 9.75, I'm also going to claim to be 1/84th of the way to my goal of losing three stone over the yer (and yes, I do realise there aren't 84 weeks in the year, so this needs to be significantly stepped up to avoid failure of that task).

Spoke to my brother, Geraint, a couple of nights ago, and he mentioned the inadvisability of the Pink Floyd Challenge - and it should be borne in mind, he's a fan. I've always maintained that life's too short to listen to Pink Floyd, which is pretty much the point of this challenge - if I do it once, I feel entitled never to have to listen to them ever again, with the exception of a very, very few tracks - and you all know the ones I mean.

As we were discussing the inadvisability of listening to every commercially released Floyd album, he muttered a sentence that cast the thing in a whole new light.
"Ah, the genius of Spotify," he said.

This honestly hadn't occurred to me. As something of an old stick-in-the-mud, I'd intended to grumpily, miserably buy all the Pink Floyd albums, listen to each of them once, and then sell the bloody things before my iPod strted to think they'd be sticking around.

But he's right of course - embracing a degree of modernity will allow me not only to achieve this task without paying for the misery of it, but also will allow me to do it while I work (the joys of working from home, it must be noted, are wondrous and manifold), thereby combining two wrist-slitting impulses into one big head-on-desk-banging week of unconscionable ordure.

I sense a plan forming. To Spotify, and don't spare the horses!