Chip Dale's Back and Armed With Memes!

The heavily oiled mass of manically depressed Welsh thongdom has been roused from his winter slumber and he has tagged me with a meme. I’m a little humbled to see myself listed in his hopes for 2008, so I’ll happily include him in my own. Those of us who go through life misunderstood by the wider world need to stay together, even if it means getting a cheap hustler’s body oil on my best casual slacks.

There are some reassuringly similar themes in our two lists. Chip is clearly a deep thinker. As, I believe, a I. His musical choices are not as suspect as I’d have imagined given that he spends his life wiggling his hips to bad disco music. All I can do is entreat him to give Serge Gainsbourg a listen.

So, my hopes for 2008 are these:

1. I manage to start earning a living with my writing, so I can begin to stand shoulder to shoulder with the greatest living author of our age, Mr. Fry.
2. I continue to blog, despite all my labours in the real world involving cleaning products, discounted tins of baked beans, or labelling guns.
3. People stop asking me to quit blogging. We can all enjoy a good laugh about it but on cold mornings and late evenings, it actually makes me pause before I put finger to key.
4. My collected volume of essays and shorter pieces, ‘Fry, Oddie & Me’, wins me the Samuel Johnson Prize, presented to me by a woman called Selena dressed in ocelot, with all my fine blog readers in attendance in the cheap seats at the back.
5. I finally master French so I can more fully devote myself to my current obsession with Serge Gainsbourg.
6. Chip also manages earn a living doing what he most enjoys doing. Not by stripping but by writing. I miss his blog.
7. My big project is a huge success bringing me yet more fame and fortune. I don’t mean ‘Dick Justice’, which will be as successful as these ITV documentaries can be, but the project I’m calling Richard Madeley’s Secret Summer Project 2008.
8. I am elected to become the new Lord Mayor for London.

I don’t normally tag other people but I’ll use this to promote some new and relatively unknown bloggers. It’s only natural that I tag my good friend Stephen Fry (but he’s so busy, I don’t expect him to even acknowledge this), my new favourite social commentator Mr. Jerry Caesar, the difficult-to-type AxyxZ, and to Bertas who is much too busy to be a couchslob.