Phil's 2005 report

Here's a starter for ten - I reckon I did alright on about half my resolutions last year. Real winners were no. 1 and no. 9: I joined an indoor football team (Gordon Biersch Thursday) and consequently exercised hard once a week, and I ate 10 homegrown chillis (see picture). I cycled to work about a third of the time (until my bike got nicked in November), and the football helped with making more American friends.

Helping Sarah with her difficult final year turned out to be pretty redundant as she seemed to stop getting slave-driven quite so hard by Freshfields, and then got engaged and got to go to Paris too, so I got to cross that one off fairly early on. Making contact with foreign friends 7 times a week I may not quite have managed though, but this blog should help with that. I hope. At least I don't think I missed a birthday, but then I came pretty close at times (sorry Jack, sorry Lou!) and didn't really have a well-defined list. However no. 5 was a bad one, I didn't really do any teaching at all.

Finally nos. 6 and 7 sort of worked: I tried hard to earn my beers by being more efficient at work, and tried to only do, at the weekend, fun things. However, things got pretty dicey in the autumn and getting together the job application package didn't go as well as I'd hoped, so I'll be throwing in a couple of work-related resolutions for 2006 I reckon.