What I reallyreally want...

I'm not very likely to get everything I really want, so I ought (by the standards I was brought up on) to be saying "Well, that won't happen so I'll settle for this instead...". 

Instead I am going to remind myself that it was on February 26th, 2003 that I said to an old friend over lunch "Well, I'm never going to meet anyone as interesting as my Favourite Baritone..." - and then walked into my Favourite Baritone outside the Post Office, the very next day. 

I look back on this weird event, as its tenth anniversary approaches, and I think that if the Almighty had wanted to give me a good kick up the a**e S/He couldn't have picked a better way to do it. 

That one (very brief) encounter in the street remains one of the biggest shocks I've ever had in my life.  Favourite Baritone had no reason whatever, at least none that I have ever discovered, for being there, on that particular day, in that particular place.  It was nowhere near where he lives.  And he stopped walking down the road right next to me.  I only looked up because I thought the pair of feet that had stopped so apparently deliberately right beside me must belong to someone I knew. 

It taught me, more effectively than any amount of preaching and teaching and pep-talking could ever have done, that anything that is within the laws of physics can happen; anything, however improbable. 

Favourite Baritone has gone on to have a pretty good ten years - lots of career success (well deserved), plus getting married and becoming a dad.  His missus has had quite a good patch too; getting married and becoming a mum, obviously, plus continuing her own rather fabulous career as a Principal of the Royal Ballet to some pretty wonderful effect.  Talk about a Golden Couple!  More power and happiness to them in 2013...

And I have gone on to have an eventful decade; a lot of which would not have happened without my having had that bizarre lesson in the Nature of the Possible.  My dad would probably still have passed away and I expect that Baby Bro would still have got his degree.  I imagine that national and international events would still have been much the same, too.  But I'm fairly sure that I would never have moved to London, found a job that paid me enough to live on, or started writing again, if I hadn't had that encounter.  So my thanks to FB, for being on that street corner, that fateful day, and kick-starting all that for me.  I owe you, mate!

May 2013, then, be a year in which more interesting things happen, in celebration and recollection of that first, startling realisation - that almost anything can happen, and therefore some good things may...

And in the name of optimism, I am going to ask for at least one of the following:
To get my writing properly published - and widely read;
To write lots more;
To meet interesting people and make new friends;
To get my own place to live and finally get out of living in shared flats and other bizarre digs;
To be healthy and for all my family and friends to be healthy too;
Love;
Joy;
Happiness;
And a hunk of my very own. Preferably an intelligent, creative one who can do DIY and likes my cooking.

Happy New Year, everyone!