So! That’s 2023 done and dusted.
Like every year, some of you may have been battered and bruised by ‘life’s little surprises’, in your professional and domestic lives or by health-related issues – but we somehow got through them.
So, as New Year resolutions are a waste of time, what can we do to make little improvements to our lives in 2024?
One friend of mine has already decided how he can improve his life this year, after he and his wife spent a horrendous evening in an Italian restaurant with a couple we’ll call Rosie and Jim, before Christmas.
Rosie’s deliberate rudeness sounds almost comical now – but wasn’t at the time.
Even though Rosie and Jim had chosen the restaurant, Rosie looked at the menu and announced there was nothing that really appealed to her, grudgingly chose a risotto and said she was unimpressed by the glass of red wine she was served.
While my friend and his wife enjoyed their food and wine, Rosie related interminable stories, mostly about her many grandchildren – which my friend and his wife received with polite smiles, ever though they’d never met the characters in these family tales.
My friend and his wife also have grandchildren but are astute enough to realise nobody wants to hear about everything they’ve been up to.
Having attentively listened to Rosie’s not-very-absorbing stories, my friend (who you might describe as a ‘showbiz veteran’) noticed with growing bemusement that whenever he began to speak, Rosie’s gaze immediately wandered across to something far more interesting in another part of the restaurant, such as a stain on a tablecloth, in a deliberately disdainful silent display of “Well, I’m not the least bit interested in your showbusiness stories!”
This is Rosie’s standard behaviour every time they meet, so he has no idea why she’d want to spend time with someone whose conversation she finds so uninteresting.
What he does know is, life is too short to spend precious time with people who treat him with contempt and that he won’t be wasting another second of it in the company of Rosie and Jim.