Last year I wrote “My 2016”, inspired by Always Improve, Never Stop, Never Pause, Never Appreciate: things I did; not necessarily “achievements”, but happy and/or notable things.
I’m glad I did, so I’m doing it again. So, in no particular order:
I got married! It was lovely. Ten people (immediate family), ceremony at Clare College where we met, and dinner afterwards.
I became a cancer patient (Primary Mediastinal B-Cell Lymphoma), had six cycles of chemotherapy (R-CHOP) and 36Gy of mediastinal radiation, and currently look like I’m on the path to remission (hopefully to be confirmed in March).
I became a founding trustee of The UK Python Association, a charity “to advance education for the public benefit in the use and understanding of the Python programming language within the UK”.
I didn’t make it to many events (wonky immune system and/or fatigue) but PyCon 2017 was great fun.
I wrote 27 blog posts - still trying to get better at “just writing things” - the curse of knowledge is real, but it gets better with practice.
I started looking into my family tree.
I bought a funky keyboard and learnt to touch-type.
I got a little way into “Smart”-ing my home, with cameras and an event platform
Lots of time in hospital gave me lots of time to read, enough to want to put together a second post of some books and brief opinions.
I saw some fantastic shows and concerts:
- Death Takes A Holiday
- ‘Art’ - white stripes on a white canvas - I first saw it years ago at the Cambridge ADC, and it was excellent to see it again
- The Wild Party - always excellent to see John Owen Jones and Victoria Hamilton-Baritt perform
- Love In Idleness
- The Glass Menagerie
- Travesties - I love Stoppard’s works, this play in particular, and Tom Hollander made a brilliant Henry Carr
- A Tale of Two Cities at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre - a very interesting production
- South Pacific in Concert
- The Lie
- A Woman Of No Importance
- Venus in Fur - Natalie Dormer. David Oakes. Wow.
- Tiger Bay
- Barnum - fantastic performance that I’m really interested to compare with The Greatest Showman when I get a chance to see it
- An American In Paris
- Glengarry Glen Ross
- Steps & Vengaboys - the Vengabus definitely came, and it was a Tragedy the night had to end
So
I went into 2017 with three broad goals: write more, make more, speak more. Circumstances made achieving them was more challenging than I’d initially expected, but it does mean I can recycle them for 2018!
Meanwhile, I think Jonty summed it up:
2018 resolution: Be nothing like 2017.
— Jonty Wareing (@jonty) January 1, 2018
(I did enjoy the getting married bit, but doing it again this year is problematic)