Hopes for the New Year

Hopes for the New Year


It’s December 27 now, or later if you are enjoying your Mayo News at the weekend. By now a lot of people are feeling guilty about excessive celebrations, too much desserts and finishing the Roses even when the strawberry flavour hardly anyone likes was all that was left.
A health kick will be part of many people’s new year aspirations but we can do more than just plan healthy living and exercise. We can have hopes - remember that word? - and dreams for 2013.
If you’re looking for profound stuff here, you’re in the wrong place. Many of these can fall into what is often described on social networks as ‘first world problems’. Reference my first one below. So, in no particular order:
I hope that never in 2013 will I end up watching TV when Fair City comes on and am not able to find the remote control. It happened too often last year and even the five seconds it took to get to the TV to manually change the channel was five seconds too long.
I hope Giovanni Trapattoni comes out with just one sentence of proper English.
I hope Trapattoni puts out a team capable of at least one passage of proper football a game.
I hope Mayo win the All-Ireland Football Championship. I hope that everyone allows themselves and are allowed to enjoy the journey, wherever it takes us. Personally I’m sick of subdued approaches - it’s not the winning and losing of finals for us.
I hope that here in The Mayo News we get plenty of light-hearted fun to report on. We believe in fun at all times, but especially when we’re surrounded by doom and gloom. So here’s hoping for stories of talking dogs, people ringing 999 when McDonalds run out of ‘McNuggets’ and a mundane court prosecution for drink driving being enlivened by a report that the accused tried to eat his own shorts to beat the breathalyser.
I hope to finish the Achill Half-Marathon in under two hours. I hope I don’t require a bike to achieve that.
I hope Breaffy senior and junior teams achieve success in their respective championships this year. That would make for some dinner dance in early 2014.
I hope everyone I ring ‘for a quote’ this year tells me what they honestly think and not what they think they ought to say.
I hope my personal record of getting six punctures in the first four months of 2012 remains an unbeaten record.
I hope for something on TV to compete with the all time best show - The Wire. Many have tried since but nobody comes close to McNulty, Bunk, Omar and the gang.
But, above all, I hope. If we don’t have that, we have nothing. I hope your 2013 is as positive, enjoyable and fulfilling as I hope mine will be.