Living For The Weekend: A 2017 Diary By The BBG

Om Puri, the great Indian actor, died on January 6th 2017. You may know him best from his starring role in East Is East: while in these pages, I've reviewed his 1997 performance in My Son The Fanatic. But aside from UK productions like those, he was also a solid and comforting presence in Indian and international films for forty years.

Here's a wee experiment for you to try. Go to your 2017 diary and turn to January 6th. Is Om Puri's death noted in there? Of course it isn't. You might just assume that all diary publishers are racists, but in fact what you're seeing is the revelation of a dirty little secret that these publishers have been keeping to themselves for decades - even though the diary says 2017 on the front, it was actually written and published in 2016.

What if there was a diary that didn't play to those rules? A 2017 diary which didn't even go on sale until January 16th 2017, largely down to Microsoft Word generating ghost pages which couldn't be edited or deleted but still kept printing out regardless? A diary which could, therefore, include events from the first two weeks of the year in its listings?

Well, that was my idea for justifying the publication delay of Living For The Weekend: 2017 Diary. But when I suggested it to The Belated Birthday Girl, she looked at me like I was some sort of mental and refused. So that's why Om Puri's death isn't listed in there. Fair enough: it's her name on the cover, after all.

If you've been here regularly over the last five years, you know the story. The Belated Birthday Girl was fed up with the way that normal diaries compress the amount of space allocated to Saturday and Sunday, despite those being the days when you've potentially got more and better appointments to document. So she created her own diary, with each week covering two pages - Monday to Friday on one page, Saturday and Sunday on the other - and published it through Lulu. The first Living For The Weekend diary was for the year 2012: since then she's also produced diaries for 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and now 2017. (Notice how the earlier diaries are all currently on sale at a 15% discount, because we're good to you like that.)

It's the same format as in previous years - a pocket-sized, perfect-bound paperback diary with a two-page view of each week. You also get calendars and notes pages (because they're easy enough to generate without causing copyright issues), and a blank page where you can glue in the travel map of your choice (because they're a little bit trickier in copyright terms).

The other feature that's kind of unique to Living For The Weekend diaries is a pair of pages setting you a project for the year. Last year's project - to visit twelve brewery taps in 2016 - was remarkably successful, and we'll be giving you details here of the bars we visited soon. This year, to give your liver a bit of a rest, The BBG has gone for a restaurant-based project: in 2017, can you eat at twelve restaurants serving national cuisines you've never tried before? Obviously, there are some parts of the world where this'll be easier to achieve than others, but that's part of the challenge.

All of this for just £3.99 (plus postage and packing)! It strikes me that if you've already got a 2017 diary and have started using it, it's early enough in the year for you to switch to Living For The Weekend and throw your old diary away. So go on, then.

Comments

[sues]

So what exactly is a 'mental and refused' ?

[SpankTM]

It's perfectly acceptable to use the word 'mental' as a noun. Like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENWpGLURBW4