I love a project. My life is littered with them, mostly abandoned. The Great Lego City (1972), The Scalextric World Championship (1979), The Random Recipe Adventure (2009 & 2013).
Often undertaken at the year’s beginning (‘New Year, New Me!’), they regularly fall by the wayside (‘ah bollocks to it’), and while you might argue that these repeated abandonments point to an intrinsic lack of commitment, even of moral fibre, I’ve learned to accept them as part of who I am.
A project can lend purpose, something to look forward to and lose yourself in, a way of giving life a slow, deep rhythm. And if the project is given up or never finished, then maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe the point is simply to immerse yourself in something for a bit.
I’m often inspired by other people’s Magnificent Projects, whether it’s Josie George’s weather scarf, the terrific Slow Ways map, or Kabir Kaul’s map detailing all the nature reserves in London. On a smaller scale – but, in its way, no less important – whoever it was who decided to log the results of all the episodes of Wacky Races has my eternal admiration (scroll down).
For all the failures, I’ve had the occasional success. In 2016, on a whim, I decided to harness the energy of my reawakened interest in all things avian by not only aiming to see 200 species of British bird, but also writing a book about the experience. Because of that whim, I am now a serially published writer.
Thank you, birds.
Less successful was my 2020 plan to read, in parallel, all twelve volumes of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time and, by way of leavening, all thirteen of the Modesty Blaise books (novels and short stories). Two books a month. What could possibly go wrong? Unfortunately this project fell at the third hurdle – not because of any fecklessness on my part, you understand, but more because of the arrival of the pandemic. It turned out that having a load of time on our hands meant little if you had the concentration span of a gnat.
Bloodied but unbowed, I continue. This year my small, achievable project is to post on Instagram, every day, a photograph of something I’ve seen that day. I’ll probably get to mid-March and then forget a day, but that, as I mentioned earlier, is not the point.
A larger project came to me – again, on a whim – as I was listening to Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas a couple of weeks ago. Fabulous music, a Christmas staple, and superbly nostalgic. It made me think, and it made me go to Wikipedia, and then it made me think again.
Which is why I’ll be spending this year rereading Peanuts. All of it.
Peanuts ran from 1950 to 2000, a majestic unbroken run of just over 50 years. Read a year’s worth every week and that’s the year sorted. And if I just happen to write about it every Sunday, well, what’s the worst that could happen?
Where these ideas come from is a mystery to me. Perhaps on this occasion it’s the need, as we enter the third year of the pandemic, to immerse myself in the comforting childhood rhythms of those simple-but-not-simple four-panel morsels. They entered my life early and stayed, acquisition of those comforting Coronet paperbacks giving my life that deep slow rhythm already mentioned. Simple but not simplistic, they gave me untold pleasure – the deep nourishing kind.
When the 50th title (‘It’s Your Turn, Snoopy’) came out in 1978, shiny gold cover adorned with Snoopy in ultimate Joe Cool pose,I rushed to W H Smith’s with my 50p (50p!), devoured it on the bus home, then devoured it again before giving it pride of place at the end of the shelf (they were lined up in order of publication – of course they were).
A couple of years later, a teacher, knowing of my continued passion for the books, and no doubt thinking them unsuitable for a 15-year-old who should have been getting to grips with Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen, gently advised me that perhaps it was time to ‘put aside childish things’. He was right about Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen, of course, but about Peanuts he was just plain wrong, deceived by the apparent simplicity of the line drawings into thinking that the content was somehow unworthy of adult consideration.
How foolish. How misguided. Peanuts might have been read by children, but ‘childish’? Never. I responded by skipping all the dreary classics in favour of P G Wodehouse. He had no answer to that.
At the time, I couldn’t have told you why I loved Peanuts so. Perhaps I unconsciously identified with Snoopy’s imaginative fantasy life (‘here’s the world famous ice hockey player…’), Lucy’s bossiness, Linus’s earnestness. Or perhaps, like so many people, it was Charlie Brown, that weird round-headed kid, who spoke to me. (Incidentally, that head is just one example of Schulz’s amazing artistry – just try and draw a perfect circle freehand). Charlie Brown was the official representative of every child who has ever tried, failed, yearned, worried, despaired, felt lonely or unloved or beaten down by the relentless unfairness of life to the extent that the only possible reaction is ‘AAAAUUUGGGHHH!’
In short, every child who ever breathed.
I know a bit more about it now, but the exact nature of the magic of Peanuts still eludes me. So perhaps spending a year in its company will shed some light. Even if it doesn’t, it will have been a worthwhile project.
And, as I think I’ve mentioned, I love a project.