It's that time of year again...

If you've been following my yearly blogs for any kind of time now, you'll appreciate that this is something I don't say too often: This year has been a good year. I can honestly look back at what I've done with myself this year and, with one or two exceptions, be genuinley pleased with what's happened.

The year started for the first time by spending a few days with my girlfriend Amy, and without giving too much away about what happens when we're together, I remember it was around those few days that we made some significant progress to the relationship that set the tone for almost everything else that's happened between us since then. It started off with the most I've ever enjoyed a New Years Eve party, (what a way to usher in 2011 - by watching Top 10 most Dangerous Airports...) and ended with a 7 hour drive back to Birmingham and an unexpected stay over at her house, following an extremely lazy day of doing absolutely nothing at all. Never a bad day.

At this point I had two jobs - working for my Dad at Coady Consultants, and also part time as a Supply Teacher for Dudley Performing Arts. I'd gone from slightly less than a day in September to almost two and a half days by Easter; I was continuing to build up the work and then, with the council cuts looming, hopefully conducting myself in a manner that would suggest to DPA that I was worth hanging on to when the time came to decide who stays and who goes. The highlight for me at that point would be the excellent weekend spent at the Pioneer Centre in Cleobury - everything I like about working with kids and teaching them new skills, I got to do on the trip. I can think of far worse ways to spend a weekend!

And then from April to about June, several things happened that really shaped the rest of the year for me. In roughly this order:

Harvey out the Fakes got married to his girlfriend Lisa. I've now been to all the Fake's weddings! It's always a pleasure to see people get married, particularly for the right reasons - to be fair I've never seen anyone get married for the wrong reason, but there you go. Congratulations Harv and Lis, it was a pleasure to come to your wedding and it all seems to be working out well for you guys, so well done!

Then I lost Perception, the band that Hannah had put together with me and John. This didn't happen with any kind of definite finality; it wasn't a case of the band broke up or fell out, we were far too lazy for any kind of drama like that. But in the year we were together, we never really had a stable lineup, it was only really complete for a few weeks, and the longer we let it go on the more we came to realise that we wanted different things from being in a band than we were going to get from Perception. And the trouble was the longer it went on, the more reluctant we were to admit it. In the end we just didn't organise any more practices, and sort of necessarily let it die. That sounds kind of vague, and deep in the vaults of memories best left forgotten I could draw up specific incidents that lead to it, but no one out the band would thank me for it. We're all still friends; Hannah and John come to my gigs from time to time and Hannah and I played live together for the first time in October; it was a long time coming but it worked in the end!

Hot on the heels of losing one band I joined 2 more. The first was Natasha and the 82s, put together by my former Crashpoint colleague Rich Shepherd, with his mate Jarvo on the drums and Sue/Natasha on the vocals. I played guitar, and we later added West on the bass and Rich switched to keyboards. We started off doing Soul music, but I think now we're moving in more of a contemporary R'n'B direction. We've done a couple of gigs, and while there are plenty of Soul bands out there, there's not many bands who'll touch the R'n'B stuff so that could be an interesting new venture for us. I don't know there's any kind of sense of integrity with which we'll be in conflict, as it is a significant change from the original purpose of putting the band together. But if the rest of the band is happy to do it, I'm happy to keep playing guitar for them. Which they need to remember, because at the time of writing I haven't seen any of them for about 6 weeks.

The other band was Aki Maera, put together by Marcus Burke and featuring another former Crashpoint member Cj on the drums. This is supposed to be a Post Hardcore band, but I've never really known what that's supposed to sound like. I explain it away by telling people that Marcus likes Fightstar, but actually I put more Evanescence into the basslines than anything else. This band suffered from an incomplete lineup as well, until we finally settled on Ian Munro on guitar. Progress hasn't been easy, we've done a couple of gigs and I think we have a lot of work to do before we try to do any more.

It was around this time that I joined the Black Country Role Playing Society (BCRPS.) I'd bought a Dungeons and Dragons set back in February and really wanted to give Roleplaying a go so I went down to Blackheath to see what these guys had going on. I've been going near enough every week since then and thoroughly enjoyed it; roleplaying games are great fun and I'm only sorry I didn't pick it up before! So far I've played Pathfinder, Leagues of Adventure, Laundry, Traveller and Star Wars, with the latter being by far the most memorable because of the wide range of quarrelsome, distinctly personal characters we all created. I'm going for a Ghost Busters game next month, we'll see what happens with that one. I'm not going to comment too much on the mixed - and not always kind - reactions I get from my contemporaries when they hear about what I'm doing, because that will spark debates and arguments that I really don't want to have.

Then George Osborne had to have his car towed, because he couldn't "budget." What this meant for me was that as the Coalition government think they can solve the country's problems with a pair of scissors, DPA had to take a savage cut to the budget and we lost a lot of what we had been doing, including the Himley Festival, most of the admin team and near enough all of the supply staff. The latter included me and all the work I had spent 8 months building up was lost.

However, I made it work in my favour. Amy had finshed her placement in Swindon and came back to Birmingham to live for a few weeks and I went and stay with her for most of that time. It was the first time we'd really lived together for any kind of time and to we like it! We're looking forward to when we get our own place but as we now both work for our local authorities, and not to mention all the stuff we're involved with - friends, bands, games, pub quizzes, families - it will be a massive step for either of us to move. I maintained, and still do, that either is as likely as the other at this point.

This carried on until late June, when Amy moved out of the house she had rented as a student in Birmingham and went home to live with her parents in Swindon. Since then we've kept up a steady stream of seeing each other once every couple of weeks, either she comes up to me or I drive down to her. We do miss our privacy, but the fact of the matter is until such time as we do move in together, this is as good as it's going to get so we may as well make the best of it! And to be fair, we've kept that going for half a year.

This of course is notwithstanding the holiday that we took in Plymouth early last August. I can't remember going that far down South before, though I think I probably have and wasn't aware of where I was at the time being only 6 years old. We had a fantastic time in Plymouth, it's a great place to be. Not sure if I'd necessarily like to live there permanently but as a holiday destination it was great, and we went, saw and did a lot of quite amazing things, not least of them precuring a membership to the National Trust which opens a lot of doors for us in terms of places we can visit when we're out and about!

Oh yeah, forgot about this: I had my first car accident back in June. Now, the people who have known me long enough to know how I ususally drive might be thinking to themselves 'How did you let that happen?!' Well, let me put it this way: When my Mom first started driving, her Dad - my Grandad - said to her "When I started driving you always needed to be one step ahead of all the other mad fools on the road, and now that you're driving you've got to be 6 steps ahead of all the mad fools on the road!" This was back in the 70s, I think; my Mom started driving fairly late. Now that it's 2012, you'd think by the same precedent you'd need to be about 15 steps ahead, but actually, no. Like a mobian strip, it's come back around on itself; it maxed out at about 10 to the point where everybody's mad and it's the sensible people that you have to watch out for. Because you never know, do you, when they're going to do something completely unexpected - like, in this case, not move off at a roundabout when she just about had enough time to do it - and if you don't notice and run into the back of them, it's you who ends up looking like a thick-as-pigs**t amatuer. In spite of the fact that there was significantly more damage to my car than there was to hers, Fiona, I am truly sorry about that.

This means I've been driving around with a dent in my bonnet for the last 7 months. It hasn't affected the handling of the car to any extent that I've noticed so I've not done anything about it, however now that I've paid the finance off, I will have to sort out a new bonnet before I sell it because it will reduce the value of the car massively if I don't. Thinking about it, if I sell it to a trader as it is, they'll have to find a new bonnet themselves, fit it, paint it if it's not the right colour... So one small act of carelessness is going to cost me a lot eventually, don't think I don't know that!

Working for my Dad is largely office work, interesting stuff but not all that exciting and I'm certainly not at liberty to discuss the things that are. However, one highlight of the year working for him that I'm very proud of is my part in the audio project. I've covered this before in the Coady blog, but what happened was this: My Dad came up with the idea of recording radio playlets for a training session he was involved with, and I pretty much took ownership of the project. Lacking the appropriate recording facilities and talent to do it all myself, before I knew it I was hiring recording studios and actors, drawing up confidentiality agreements, and directing a sound project that turned out to be very well received by our clients. It's far from typical of the work I do for my Dad, but if I could look at 1 piece of work I did for him and say 'yes, I did that,' it would be the audio project. So well done again to all who were involved, and well done to me for taking one of my Dad's mad ideas and turning it in to something we can actually use, very pleased with myself for this one!

Now my New Year's Resolution for 2011 was to play a gig every week, and apart from the two weeks I was on Holiday (I'm also counting amongst this the week when when me and Amy went to Drew's birthday party in Wales,) I managed it. There have been good ones, there have been bad ones, thankfully I haven't been booed off yet though there have been times when I would have deserved it. The highlight of all of these, however, was Codfest in September, which replicates the experience of a festival very well indeed and was the most I had enjoyed myself at a gig for a long time. There were a lot of Summer Festivals around the Midlands and I went to and played quite a few of them, but the other ones we're talking about maybe 30 people in attendance, if that? Codfest managed 500. All the performers did exceptionally well, and I was very proud to be a part of it. Now I was also proud to achieve my goal of playing a gig every week, but I couldn't have done it alone, for making it happen, thanks to the following people are in order: Sam Draisey, Roy, Jane and Kayla for all the open mics, Emma and Adam from the Sunflower Lounge, Cal and Joy from Prickly Music, Dale and Sam from Acoustic Brew, Rich from the 82s and Marcus from Aki Maera for getting the gigs with the respective bands, Hannah (the gig at the Cricket Club was a fantastic event and it was great to have been a part of that as well,) and not least Amy, for coming to the gigs when they coincided with a visit, or even when they didn't, which probably accounts for about half of them.

To be honest the period running up to Christmas happened in a blur of things that kept on happening, but I'm pleased with my contribution to Dudley Performing Arts as well, who suffered a savage cut to their budget and needed to come up with a different arrangement to compensate for it. The result was a hugely different but more efficient operation that I started off with I think 3 regular students. This number has now grown in to something like 25, 12 of which are from one school, and I think that the way in which it has grown has been fantastic as even to this day I'm getting students added to my roster. It's been a rough term but hugely rewarding and I'm looking forward to seeing how it all develops in the rest of the year.

Christmas went by, as it always does, in a bit of a blur. However I appear to have delveloped a talent for cooking Cheese Straws. I spent as much of it as I could with Amy, which included several trips to the German Market and a few days at a hotel in Birmingham, and a New Year's Eve party which was good fun as well. I needed the couple of weeks off, I can tell you that!

So that's the highlights of the year. Any regrets? Hmm... not happy with the gain in weight, and I'm doing what I can to try and do something about it. At no point does it ever become OK for me to weigh 15 stone 2 pounds, and some of the more recent photographs of me are showing what the mirror doesn't. So that needs to be dropped. I'm not saying it's going to happen quickly. I know what I have to do - cut out coke, and chocolate, and take-aways, basically what I do every lent - but giving up something infefinitely is just going to drive me mad to be perfectly honest. So what I'm doing instead is drinking coke less times a week than more, eating takeaways less times a month than more, and chocolate... well I make life very difficult for people when I'm not eating chocolate, so I've not banned myself from that, but I know when I'm eating too much, don't do it!

That's the only one, really. I'm largely happy with everything I've done this year!

Ambitions and resolutions?

I would like to go to Download this year. I know some people aren't as excited about this any more but my God, Black Sabbath are headlining! It's been a long time since anyone's really considered them local heroes as opposed to international mega-stars, but they're all getting on a bit in years now and at some point they're going to have to call it a day. I'd really like to see them before that happens and I hope they can still deliver the goods when I do!

With my music, my resolution is to learn one new song every week. I think my playing and writing has been stuck in a rut, and I learn a lot about playing by learing other people's songs. I can't write for it's own sake because it invariably turns out to be rubbish, but there's a load of songs I want to learn and who knows, it may give me some new ideas!

I don't often make gaming resolutions, because for me until about this time last year it started and ended with either Games Workshop or Yu Gi Oh cards and I lack the commitment or the finances to stick to them. What I'd like to do is visit every Games Worshop in the country and play a game in there with someone; one of the regulars or a participation game. I'm a long way from doing that yet, as my armies are a joke and the ones I'm building are slow progress, so this is a more long term plan than just for the year. I'd also like to start a conistent role-playing group; the club's great but not necessarily for long-term campaigns, and trying to get one going has been a bit of a non-starter due to distance and people's availability. It's something I'd like to do because I do feel I'm missing out!

My main one for the year though is to move in with Amy, that's the next step and it's one we need to get sorted! Not quite sure how we're going to manage it yet, but here's to hoping we will.

So, not a bad year! Let's hope 2012's even better! Happy new year, I'll see y'all again at some point...