Day 365. It was a very good year. (31/12/13)

"All the things I care about are packed into one punch. All the things I'm not sure about are sorted out at once."

And here we are at last; the end. For somebody who does neither resolutions nor diaries I appear to have done quite well with keeping to this one. I started with no plan other than to write every day and see where it got me, see whether I could exercise the writing muscle that I thought I used to have, see if I could find something to say every single day.

God knows there were days where I had absolutely nothing to say, where I had to waffle in order to fill a page (and I always thought that I should fill the page, the shorter pieces felt like cheating myself - a paragraph isn't writing, it's a Facebook update) although opinion seems split on which of the pieces were the desperate waffle; there were days that I thought were appalling but some people seemed to enjoy most. Shows what I know.

I decided fairly early on that stopping on my 50th birthday as I'd originally intended wasn't notable enough; it had to be the full year, 365 is such a nice number and there's magic in numbers.

There's magic in words too, magic in writing, I've proved as much to myself with this; decide what you are, give it a name, write it down and it happens. I've reinvented myself on a regular basis through the last twelve months; smallish steps, achievable goals that lead onto the next set of ambitions. I decided that I'd like to review the papers on CityTalk's breakfast show. It happened. Not through my nominating myself (although I did that) but from a Twitter follower's e-mail recommendation to the station.

I knew that I wanted to be published to a wider audience and it took me all of three days to make that happen; I'd dashed off a piece of invective covering Joe Cole's move to West Ham and somehow (and I've never found out how) Sabotage Times chanced across it and contacted me. I now have 80ish articles on the site, each reaching between one and five thousand readers and mostly football based. I have inadvertently become a sports journalist. Considering that this was my Dad's ambition when he was younger I'm fairly chuffed with that but faintly surprised as I thought that I was a music journalist.

You may have noticed my music journalistic ambitions in my endless lists, my Beatles theses, my ongoing obsession and frequent returns to Bowie, The Bunnymen, The Clash, Mike Scott's Waterboys, Michael Head, The Smiths and The Stone Roses. J was never a fan of those days, she liked the days when I focused on family and friends. A friend pointed out half way through the year as she shared my blog with her friends that no matter what I was writing about, what I was actually writing about was my life, my family and how much I love my wife. She was right. As was another friend who pointed out that I would keep slipping in little slices of my life story into otherwise unrelated pieces. Somehow, over the last year, I've told you my life story at the same time as changing the path of that story.

You know me by now, even if you didn't before. You know how I feel about the way that music binds us all together in shared moments, in shared memories. You know that I treasure objects for the links that they have to people, for the stories that they bring with them. You'll realise that, despite the hardened cynic on the outside, I'm actually a hopeless old romantic inside.

Ah yes, romance. I don't do Valentines Day. I did this year, in the best way possible. Gentlemen, give up now, I've won.

I also don't do April Fools but I got away with a blinder on April 1st with the idea that I'd run out of opinions. Like that was ever going to happen.

As to those opinions; I'm well aware that I don't do shades of grey, I'm a very black and white person, everything is either great or appalling, middle ground is a dull place to be so I avoid it. That may mean that at times I come across as opinionated, didactic, convinced that my opinion is always right. Fair comment, I am. Other opinions are available. But generally less entertaining.

And this is where I should thank everybody. Thanks to everybody that's read any of this, thanks to everybody that's commented on it (whether to agree or to argue) and many thanks to everybody that has ever passed a single day's writing on, it's very much appreciated and I've been genuinely humbled by the words of so many of you. Thank you, it would have been a much smaller experience without you.

I've written during insomnia bouts that recur from time to time, written whilst utterly paralytic; sent dispatches from London, Coventry, Rhodes, Tenerife and Paris. I passed fifty and it made no difference to me but then it was never going to was it?

J obviously receives special praise for her support throughout this and for everything that she has achieved at the same time; she is truly remarkable and I'm sure that those of you that don't know her personally are aware of this by now. Those that do know her? Well, you knew already didn't you?

I though that I started all this as a document of aging, of the experience of heading toward the big five oh when what I was really doing was documenting my rebirth. In a year when I was almost redundant  then wasn't and now am again (genuinely, really, for sure, this time) the rebirth was immaculately timed.

I know where I'm going next year, I've given you the hints, I'll give you some names that won't mean anything to you yet;

'Kites'
'Brilliant Solutions'
'Summer 1930 Possibly'
'Ghosts - a love story'

And obviously - Mumblingintothevoid.com

They're coming. I have a plan.

(Kites is written. It's a screenplay. All it took was a pandemic six years later. Ghosts is plotted out. Brilliant Solutions? Summer 1930? The time may have passed for one, may come again for the other. Instead I wrote a few short films, a book about Liverpool, a superhero novel and ten plays. That's all in the future though, that takes the next half decade.

The blog returns as well: some one-offs then a plan to do another whole year which lasted for the first hundred days or so and then became something I no longer needed. For the moment though, back in 2013...)

So, one last message and then we're out of here;

In three hours (9pm as I finish writing) we hit a new year. You can make it anything that you want it to be. Decide what you want and take the first step. Take a little chance and keep pushing forward.

Have an incredible New Year. See you on the other side.