Hardeep Singh Kohli

HARDEEP is your love

Cyclists, get off your hobbyhorse

The Middle East peace process. The global financial meltdown. Climate change and our future on the planet. I suggest we gather together the country's cyclists to sort out these troubling topical issues. Because every road user knows that cyclists are always right. Oh yes. Cyclists are never wrong. Ever. All other forms of vehicular and non-vehicular transport will have a bad hour, bad day or bad week on the roads. But not our non-motorised, bi-wheeled friends. They are never wrong. No.

I came to this realisation as I crossed the road, in the reflected glory of the green man. A cyclist, seeing me and my dozen or so cohorts crossing the road, decided to ignore the red light and keep going. Now, I could have stopped. I didn't mean to walk into his back wheel and make him lose his balance. But I did. And I suggested in my finest Glaswegian vernacular that he abide by the terms of the Highway Code. Of course he told me that I was wrong. That's because cyclists are always right. Always.

Ever hopeful as Ne'er Day approaches

It's been a strange and changesome year for me. I can't remember a more troubling, tumultuous and trying year in my life. I might be tempted to be glad to see the back of 2008 – during which I became a single man again – and welcome with relief the incoming 2009. But in doing so I would not be embracing the changes, not accepting my failures, not hoping to build on my new self-awareness.

In a strange way, despite the onerous emotional implications of the past 12 months, I feel a sense of attachment to this closing calendar year. It should be the first year of the rest of my life.

And while Christmas Day, spent alone, passed with an absence of reverie, a dearth of fanfare, I feel Hogmanay ought to be marked this year.

I never knew what to do on Hogmanay. Unlike the 25th of the month, for me there is no pattern to follow, no protocol to adhere to. I have tried going out. In 1988, I danced the bells in to Runrig at the QM Union at Glasgow University, my skin full of snakebite. Classy. The next year I opted for more sophisticated partying. (The Welsh family in Glasgow's West End throw the best New Year party ever in the history of parties. Peter with his jazz band in the front room and Ma Welsh providing everything for her guests, including vocal accompaniment.)

I have been at Bangalore Golf Club in shirtsleeves under a cloudless sky on Hogmanay and have had the New Year drummed in by an army of Indian drummers. I have stayed in the warm bosom of the family, chinking a wee glass of something, having enjoyed the Reverend IM Jolly and a wee bit of Still Game. (That actor that plays the shopkeeper is very good.)

This year I am working during the bells. I'll be spending my first ever Hogmanay in Edinburgh, up the Castle. It will be my first Hogmanay ever not with family. I have no idea where the year ahead will take me, where the next decade will lead. That uncertainty makes me think of Janus, the two-headed Roman god that gave his name to the month of January. He had one head to look forward to the year ahead, one to reflect over the months that have passed. Janus-like, I too will be looking back at my life past and trying to look ahead to what lies in store. Hopefully a Happy New Year. Hopefully.

Those people in First Class, rattle your jewellery

On my way back from a trip to Slovenia last week I was heartened by the passenger response to our touchdown in Blighty. Spontaneous applause emanated from every class of seating, an audible congratulating relief on the part of the passengers. Planes are funny places. Seemingly normal folk metamorphose into freaks and weirdos when placed in the cabin of a jet. To some extent this is understandable. It's a stressful business, this flying lark.

I was a perfectly placid traveller for most of my life, barely containing my boyhood boisterousness at the enigma of human flight. Planes were metal worlds of excitement, soaring spaces of dreams. The fact that I never understood the science that kept them in the sky during their gravity-defying journey seemed the furthest thing from my mind. After all, there was free food, free movies and ladies with smart uniforms and very long legs.

Later in life, the legs got longer, the food was chargeable and the uniforms less sartorially noteworthy; and the issue of air-based buoyancy started to become an issue.

After the birth of my own kids I became a great deal more anxious about flying. I experienced knotted stomachs, twitchiness and cold sweats. I looked nervously around my fellow passengers for a woman or man of the cloth in the misguided hope that if there were a God, she or he might be more inclined to look after their own. After one too many sweaty journeys, I took a hold of myself. I explained to myself that the likelihood of being involved in a plane crash was significantly less than that of me crashing a car. ( I managed to gloss over the fact that walking away unscathed from a car crash is considerably more likely.)

I also managed to quell my existential angst by embracing the concept that even a planeful of nuns, rabbis, imams and charity workers would not deliver me from my inevitable death, should my death indeed be inevitable on that journey. And it is with this beautiful inevitability that I too am happy to applaud a safe landing.

Were it not for seat belt restrictions, on occasion I would be tempted to offering a standing ovation.

I lost that loving feeling…

There's a point, when you're having a skinful, when the world is a truly wonderful place. This is the honeymoon period before devastating and full-scale drunkenness takes hold. (Vomiting, fighting and/or chips can be the consequences of this overindulgence.)

At this point in the proceedings, Glaswegians will tell all and sundry that we love them (lampposts included). Tuesday night last week I decided to time the length of this window of lovingness. I had consumed my bodyweight in vodka and very yellow tequila and felt comfortably numb to the world and its vagaries.

The love washed over me. I embraced a man named Brian, I offered my coat to a lady called Felicity, and bought two drinks for the same barman, thinking he was two different people. My love-in lasted 25 minutes, a busy 25 minutes, but less than half an hour. Shortly thereafter I bundled myself into a cab and to bed. The love had gone.