KEY POINTS:
Last week I looked backwards and recapped on the New Year's resolutions I made last year. This week I am going to look forward and give you, the reader, a preview of what you can expect from me over the coming year.
By next month I hope to
be fully up to speed as a columnist once again, capable of delivering contemporary content that doesn't rely on looking either backwards or forwards.
March will be a learning period for all of us, and I will be experimenting with a range of different keyboards and trying to inject far more sarcasm into my work.
Some stage in April I will reveal how April Ieremia has topped a recent poll as the person most people would like to see more often on the cover of the women's magazines.
April often graced the covers of mags like New Zealand Woman's Weekly last year with a raft of gripping stories with catchy headlines like "April's Summer of Love".
As it happens "April's Summer of Love" was not a cheap kiss-and-tell recounting of a summer romance, but rather a tell-all piece about how much the "TV star" loves the actual season of summer. But don't worry we weren't disappointed!
For me the quote that gave the piece of journalism its edge was "I loved those long holidays - they seemed to go on for ages". This, not surprisingly, was the quote that the New Zealand Woman's Weekly chose to highlight above all others.
Who would have guessed? Many of us, I'm sure, will have shared similar feelings about summer but I challenge anyone to articulate them as succinctly as April did in the New Zealand Woman's Weekly.
I related to this article as soon as I read it for, amazingly, summer is also my favourite season, followed closely by spring, autumn and then winter, respectively.
I tend to rank them in order of highest temperature to lowest, but one has to be aware that this isn't always the case, as some people have been known to rank winter higher than some of the other months because of their love for skiing and winter sports. April clearly isn't one of those.
My summer memories are also played back through a rose-tinted film projector: barbecues in the sun, the smell of freshly mown grass, and the compulsory skinny-dipping for all the children in the pool during my boarding-school years.
The later memory has since been a little soured by the fact that the housemaster who insisted on the no togs policy, was later arrested for attempting to procure illegal semen samples from some of the older boys, but nevertheless it was one hell of a summer weather wise.
New Zealand Woman's Weekly wrote that April can't remember a rainy summer day during her childhood and they supported this with another quote - "it must have rained sometime but, if it did, I can't remember it" - she says, wrapping a sarong around her newly slim figure after a cooling swim in a friend's pool.
I also liked how some contemporary information about one of April's other favourite story topics, her on-going weight-loss struggle, was seamlessly blended in amidst the main story thread - the love of the season of summer.
I am sure that together they will have many other amazing stories for us this year and with such an exciting array of life experiences to draw on I am sure we won't be waiting long for the next one.
The deeper I read, the more I found myself wanting to know more about April the person, her incredible unabashed love for summer, and what stories she may have in store for us over the next year.
New Zealand Woman's Weekly chose to highlight another quote from April, hinting that there may be plenty of great stories to come: "I'm happy in my skin and feel optimistic about the years ahead".
Again, I could relate immediately to what April was saying for, although I may not be all that optimistic about the future, I am certainly happy in my current skin.
This amazing article finishes with a quote from April herself: "My 30s were great and now I'm in my 40s and loving it, so who knows what 50 will be like - maybe it'll be more peaceful? I just don't know. Ask me when I get there!"
Somehow I get the feeling that we might not have to.
