My New Years Resolutions

This year I have decided to make some New Years Resolutions. This is a thing I do some years and other years not but mostly I don't. So far, I have never knowingly kept a single resolution.

My first resolution is actually a repeat of last years resolution. I started off last year full of the intention of learning Polish. This was because of the numbers of Polish and other eastern Europeans who had come to Ireland and weren't able to speak English. I worked at the time as a base controller in a taxi company and a few words of Polish – eg "take the second left and it's the fourth house on the right opposite the Spar shop" – would have been useful when talking to some taxi drivers as much as to the customers.

My learnings in Polish didn't go very far. I fell at almost the first hurdle: the alphabet. There's one of the letters which looks like a 'g' with a 'r' on its tail and sounds like you can't make up your mind whether you're trying to pronounce 'g' or 'o' (or at least in my case I couldn’t anyway) which I still haven't managed to master. I gave up after a month.

I regretted this later on in the year as I found myself in a different job where the need to speak Polish had become more urgent. Most of my workmates, and two of my supervisors, were Polish and while one of the supervisors had decent enough English, the rest hadn't and communication became a painful task of pointing, sign language, smiling, exasperated shrugging and repeating. I hadn't moved location by the way. I was still living in Dublin but I had the benefit of finding out what it was like to be a stranger in a strange land without needing to book any flights.

This was as equally difficult for my workmates as it was for me. Sometimes at work me and one of the Poles would be working together for two or three hours on our own. I had thought for a while that working with Poles would be a good way to learn to speak the language but as it turns out the person you're trying to learn from needs to be able to speak both languages. Trying to learn Polish from a Pole who can't speak English doesn’t work. I found this out from a day working with a Polish theology student who was over here for three months to raise money. He was obviously well educated but since we didn't have a language in common there was no way that I could learn anything from him.

During the year I also added Chinese to the must-learn list. This happened because I got a free download of a teach-yourself-mandarin audiobook. Funnily enough I was doing pretty well at this until laziness set in and I stopped the lessons.


My second resolution is to get new glasses and wear them. This is because I am short-sighted. And also vain. I stopped wearing my glasses regularly a couple of years ago and started carrying them around in my pocket, wiping them out to see what number bus was coming and then putting them back and hoping that nobody noticed. I did this because I think I looked better without them.

A side effect of this is that I try to avoid looking at people. If I see someone that looks vaguely familiar on the other side of the street I have a problem because I can’t be sure if it really is them as everything's blurry. Since I'm more likely not to know them than I am, I look away and hope they didn't see me staring at them. I'm sure over the years this has led to lots of people thinking that I had just snubbed them and was trying to avoid them and to many, many more people thinking that there was a strange man across the street staring at them.

I have now decided that since the difference to my looks is probably pretty marginal I may as well wear them and see where I’m going and who I'm staring at.


So here they are. Those resolutions in full:

- Have another go at learning Polish and Chinese.

- Get new glasses and wear them.