Well, welcome to 2018 on Den Språkliga Skatan! I wanted to start off the year with a bit of a personal touch, rather than boring you half to death with my latest linguistic obsession (which is Welsh, by the way). This year I wanted to get to know you all a little better, and help you get to know me – so I’m going to give you a run-down of my New Year’s Eve. Now this might not exactly be the best example of my writing that you’ve ever seen, but I think you’ll begin to understand why when you get to the end of this entry. Right then! Buckle up and let’s get this show on the road.
For the past five years or so, I’ve spent every New Year’s Eve with my good friend Hilda, at her home. For three of these five years, we’ve been joined by her childhood friend Olivia, who flies over from Sweden especially for the occasion. What ensues is usually a night of drinking and card games, before we usually collapse from exhaustion at about 4am.
The year ended not with a whimper, but with a series of loud, obnoxious bangs. The fireworks started at six in the evening, by which point we’d already been two hours deep into a game of Cards Against Humanity. We would continue the game – drinking our way through the WKD rainbow – for another three and a half hours, remarking that the ‘blue’ flavour doesn’t seem to be as blue as it was when we were younger, and people were less concerned about the colour of alcopops until they were coming back up later on in the evening.
In any case, we continued on to a good old fashioned game of Ring of Fire, as is our wont, busting out the almost antique spirits from our hostess’ cavernous drinks cupboard. Honestly, who drinks Midori in this day and age? Answer: me. And I drank a lot of it. If I close my eyes I can still taste the aggressively cool (and vaguely minty) watermelon flavour, which obviously I had to remove with prosecco as quickly as possible.
We stood outside and watched the fireworks as the clock struck midnight, called our loved ones briefly and got back to our game. At which point, Hilda’s boyfriend Mike began to regale us with an entertaining (and very, very long) story about the origin of their white plastic Christmas tree, which involved driving to Iceland, a murderous sex worker and no less than two popes – one current, one future. He meandered on for a good half hour before concluding, telling us that that is the origin of rainbows, clearly having forgotten the point of the story as he had been telling it. And in a way, that’s quite like life, isn’t it? (No, I know. But if I don’t attempt to make this at least a little philosophical in some way, you’re all going to think I’m a raging alcoholic with delinquent bards for friends. Which… isn’t technically all that inaccurate.)
So what about you? What did you get up to this New Year’s Eve (if you can even remember)? It’s always nice to hear from you, so drop a comment or you can even catch me on my new Twitter and Instagram accounts, I’m @sprakskatan on both or you can click the links. As always, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you all next month. Happy 2018, everyone!
– J.
den språkliga skatan 