Best Laid Plans!

                          Dear Friends, it was a good plan. I brooded on it for a few minutes. I decided it fitted into my lazy modus operandi. And, what is more, my poor work ethic for once would have purpose. Admittedly it was late in the day. Maybe I should have begun to initiate it a month before when I was strolling pointlessly around the UK. But here I was and there on my email was the request. Would I be Santa Claus again this year at Norgate School? I would be honoured and delighted. So, rather than don the white beard, I would set aside shaving and grow my own. I already had the white hair, I had the Claus paunch, the aging ‘Ho, Ho, Ho” and now I would become even more of a real deal. The Santa voice and the questions of the wee takkers would come on the day. But if any little devil decided to pull on Santa’s beard because he suspected it was false then he would be in for a rude awakening. And then, ho hum,  Dear Reader, sadly, the Davidson thinking went a bridge too far.

               Vanity and self-absorption raised their ugly heads. I could become professorial in demeanour. I could leave the beard to a certain length so that I could double as an Oxford don, ‘Professor Davidson’ had a lovely pretentious ring to it.  I would trim it if it became logger like. That would not do. I do not own a plaid shirt and braces. I would not attempt to become Seumas Davidson, the Norwegian arborist. The sound of a chain saw has me searching for a green party membership form.  Yes, Dear Reader, I would become the academic with corduroy jacket and elbow patches. Why, I would even smoke a pipe. I would pontificate with world weary wisdom with every wrinkle in my well worn face rueful in its grinning know-it-all condescension. In short a new growth of white beard would raise me to the status of an insufferable bore. I would drive people away from me. Friends would  be seen at a distance, swerving suddenly in a different direction.  And I would not care because I would be confident in my arrogance, arrogant in my confidence. I would become content in my hermit like existence. I would live in a pie in the sky.

      The beard grew but not quickly enough. By Santa Claus Day it was a thin, pale, pathetic paucity of what was needed. But after I had been photographed with many children and their parents and had discarded Santa for another year I could have shaved the thing off. But my dream of professorial pretence continued morphing into the possibility of becoming an artist of Bohemian lifestyle inhabiting a garret in a three storey Amsterdam house. It would be a place of pallets and easels, dirty dishes and empty whisky bottles. The floorboards would creak with memories of decadent debauchery. I would be in there for days delivering wide brush strokes on blank canvases; moulding stunning busts of famed celebrities; working towards an ever decreasing deadline on a royal commission. But, Friends, I would stop short at cutting off an ear!

   Absolute rubbish, Dear Reader.  The story of my life has never been one of stunning brilliance. Every attempt at dressing a part has always been doomed to an almost instant return to what I really am. I am a scruffy mess. So now dressed in my state of dishevelled dishabille with my unkempt beard I have added to my look a new level of inverse snobbery. What once was scruffy is now scruffier. Now when I put forth opinions, stun people with my knowledge, branch out into eclectic fields, suggest that I am a true fraterniser with renaissance thinking. Now, friends, I am become the old bore at the end of the bar who is tolerated but ignored. People are kind. They pass the time of day. They nod wisely. They smile agreement. But they are gone very quickly, anticipating that they may see me later crouching in a shop doorway. One should always accept who one is, don’t you know. There is no point in stepping up to a plate that isn’t yours. Of course, friends ,there is every point in taking a risk, otherwise one never does anything, trying something new but there comes a moment when one needs to return to what one is and where one has come from. So cometh the new year, departeth the old one, there will be a Davidson who sits down with himself, views whom he has been, where he has been and will try to be a better version of himself but realising at the same time that there is much he cannot change.

        So this new year, this 2026 I am on a collusion course. I am not going to make resolutions. I am determined to collude and not collide. I am minded to recognise finally who I am and understand what I should never and could never be. If you called me a wit you would be halfway correct. I am big and friendly and I try to be kind. I have some very weird ideas on how the planet and society should conduct itself.  I see the world through spectrums of spontaneity and round-the-next corner curiosity . I should render unto Pete that which is Pete’s and leave the rest to others. My New Year’s resolution is to let Pete be Pete until wiser heads prevail and the march of his folly is headed off at the pass. ‘Wiser heads’ will likely be wife and offspring and most other people who stumble across my path.  But here, Dear Friends, in my joyful aloneness, my solitary dreamscape,  I have been looking about to find quotations which might help me fit into 2026 and help me to understand better what sort of people rule our world. These are ambiguous thoughts at the moment but, I think, I am reassured enough by the wisdom I have found in what I have read to suggest that the wise and the thoughtful over hundreds of years have seen it all before. They have put wholesome thoughts into a clarity which I don’t have. Here, Friends, be quotations which I am going to take into the beginning of 2026 and nudge me into believing that all is not lost.

“Very little is needed to make a happy life, it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.”  Marcus Aurelius.

“The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.” Marcus Aurelius

It is always relatively easy, Friends, to find a quotation to suit one’s needs. Old Marcus Aurelius always seems to come up with the goods.

So here at the beginning of 2026 it has not escaped my notice that we are entering the second quarter of the century. We are not only entering a new year but also a new quarter. In the first part of the century we seem to have forgotten a great deal that humanity learned in a period spanning several previous millennia!

“Speaking what is true, is not speaking what is desirable.” Albert Camus

“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men or women he has around him,” Machiavelli

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.” Ernest Hemingway

“The power of books—-J.K. Rowling became a billionaire writing books—Jeff Bezos became a billionaire selling books—-Warren Buffet became a billionaire reading books. “

“In a world where anyone’s meaning becomes as valid as everyone else’s, meaning therefore becomes meaningless.” Melanie Phillips

“Respect for religion has become a code for fear of religion. Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire and our fearless disrespect.” Salman Rushdie

“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. “ Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.” Charles W. Eliot

“It is interesting to cut yourself to pieces once in a while and wait to see if the fragments will sprout.” T.S. Eliot

“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.” JRR Tolkien.

“Arrogance is asking a god who wouldn’t stop the holocaust to find your car keys.” Ricky Gervais

“Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to offend the imbeciles.” Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.’ Voltaire.

“Never in recorded history has a 4 year old found his father’s loaded book and accidentally killed his younger sister. Yet we ban books.”

OK, Friends, enough already. I am the adult who taught the child to begin to spell ‘banana’ but never how to end it! There is so much that is good and quotable out there but if I carry it on you will still be reading into 2027! 

Thanks for reading.

 An Happy and Prosperous New Year to all of you.           (Think I’ll have a shave).