Oath, Boast and Toast 2024 | New Year Resolutions

Join as I ring in the New Year at a friend’s glittery house party, complete with dangerously delicious lemon drop cocktails and a spectacular view of the city fireworks. From the lively countdown to the final drink, this vlog captures the festive spirit of welcoming 2024.

As the night unfolds, I share my heathen New Year tradition of making an oath, boasting about accomplishments, and raising a toast to meaningful moments. Reflecting on the previous year, I delve into the completion of a historical novel manuscript and a memorable European walkabout, highlighting adventures from the UK to Morocco.

Get a sneak peek into my creative goals for the upcoming year, including recording an audiobook and mastering the art of riding a big motorbike for a road trip to Gisenyi. Join me in raising a toast to my cats, Sophie and Sen, as they recover from health challenges, and share your own goals, accomplishments, and toasts in the comments below.

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#NewYear2024 #CelebrationVlog #OathBoastToast #EuropeanAdventure #AudiobookRecording #MotorbikeRoadTrip #FireworksView #CreativeGoals #NewYearResolution #VlogLife

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ME

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Hi guys. So, I’m all glittery tonight because  I’m heading out to a friend’s house party and   then we’re going to do our oath, boast and  toast. Thank you to my friends Vera and David   for hosting New Year. Their daughter made some  dangerously delicious lemon drop cocktails and  

It was a lovely festive vibe. We headed up  to the balcony for the countdown. They live   in Rebero, which is an area of town with an  outstanding view of the city. It’s incredibly   pretty at night and the perfect place  to view the new year fireworks.

Five, four, three, two, one. [loud cheering] Happy New Year! – Oh, over there! – Wow! – Oh, they’re everywhere! Oh, wow! – Wow! [Yes!] [cheering] – Wow! [firework bangs] – Woow! – We are here! – [laughing] Fireworks everywhere! [cheering] We got a perfect view of the  fireworks going off in Nyamirambo,

The centre of town, and at Rebero Cinema.  It was such a beautiful way to welcome 2024. [upbeat music] – Wow. – Wow. [firework bangs] [upbeat music] Happy New Year! [cheering and ‘woow’] Chin chin, cheers! Ah, Isme!

So, I’ve just got home from the New Year’s  celebration. It’s about 1:30 in the morning, I guess.   It was such a lovely night. I got to spend  it with some really good friends, some friends that   I’ve known for years and some friends that I’ve  recently made. It was just lovely. So, I’ve just  

Got home and I was going to do my oath, boast and  toast but I’m tired [laughing] so I’m going to go curl up   and tomorrow- tomorrow morning I shall do my  oath, boast and toast. I hope you’ve had a lovely   New Year wherever you are. Let me know where you spent it below.

Hello and good morning… uh, just. It is only just still morning. I’m a little bit hung  over. All right, so it is time to do this. We have   got the drinking horn, we have got the drinks. We  are going to do the oath, boast and toast. So, this  

Is a heathen New Year tradition where you make a  promise for something that you’re going to do in   the year to come, so your oath, you’re going to  boast about something that you did in the previous  

Year that you’re proud of having done, and then  raise a toast to something or someone. So, I always   begin by reviewing my oath from the previous year.  Now, really you’re only supposed to make the one oath, 

But last year I made two. I made a creative  one and I made sort of a personal one, so my   creative one was to do with writing, it was either to kind of complete an audio book that I was  

Working on or to complete a manuscript that I was  writing. It was basically, ‘get something finished,’   you know, because I have all of these projects on the go, and I was feeling like I just wasn’t really  

Completing anything. So, one of the big ones was  I had written a very, very long manuscript for a   historical novel that I was writing, set in ancient  Mesopotamia, and it had basically been sitting  

In a drawer for well over a year because, I don’t  know, I just didn’t- I didn’t know what to do with it,   so one of my oaths was to finish that. I have been editing that for many, many months now and

By ‘editing,’ I mean it has been sitting in a drawer,  gathering dust. I really need to pull my finger out  and get that done. I’d like to get it, you know,  the finalised draft out on spec.

And the update on that is I did it. I actually finished editing it to a standard that I’m really happy with and it   is currently out on subs, so out on submission.  We’ll see. It might get somewhere, it might not  

Get somewhere, you never know. You roll the dice,  and if it doesn’t I will probably release   as a personal project, just because I am actually quite proud of it now. I am quite happy with it.

So, that’s  cool. And then I made a second one, which was to go traveling, is to go on a walkabout. So, this was   actually the second year that I’ve made this one,  because I tried before and I just didn’t quite  

Get there, but I have some really good friends in  the South of France, Ruairí and Martine, and I hadn’t   seen them for a really long time and I just really  wanted to go and see them. So, I thought that would  

Be a great opportunity to have a little bit of  a wander, see a bit of Europe, you know, possibly I   said go down to Spain to see my friend Maia there,  and just get out of town for a bit, go and see   something new, do something new.

I desperately want to go on a little European walkabout. I’ve been threatening this for a few years, just before  COVID hit, and so then wasn’t able to do it but   I want to go to the Hague to visit my cousin Tamsin, and then I want to go to Brussels to see my  

Friends Harris and Rob, and then I was thinking I  would like to go and see my friends Martine and Ruairí   who were very, very close friends years ago we were  all in VSO together. We all arrived here together  

And spent two years in Rwanda through the thick  and the thin of it. Very, very close friends who   I haven’t seen in years, and they now live in the  South of France. I’ve never been to the South of France,

And I haven’t been on a train in years, and  years, and years, and it sounds like such a silly   thing but I really want to go on a train. I’d like  to do that and then maybe from there go and see  

Some friends and Spain, if I have any money left by that point. And yeah, I think I pretty much nailed that one. I went on a three-month adventure. I started by  flying from Rwanda to Brussels and then taking  

Eurostar to the UK. Whilst in the UK, I atended a  Masonic ball, which involved trying on a lot of dresses. [upbeat music] I had a pint at my local and explored some English churches and traditional crafts. [hand bells] Then it was onto the Hague with my cousin, where we hung out

On the beach, looked at weird sculptures, and drank beer. [chill music] Next, I took a bus down to Brussels where  I explored chocolate, beautiful architecture,   crazy graffiti and rude pastries. There was also a  stunning piano collection and a van Gogh exhibition.  

From there, I crossed into France on a train bound  for Lyon, where I discovered a sumptuous golden   basilica, Our Lady of Africa, a stunning Roman  amphitheater, and a really creepy museum full   of marionettes. I continued my train journey south  to Narbonne, to reunite with an old friend. Cake was  

Involved. We looked at Roman artifacts, wandered  around the expansive market, and there was even   a day at the beach. From there I took a ten-hour  overnight bus down to Finestrat in southern Spain,   where I spent three weeks on a friend’s couch,  painting pebbles on the beach, visiting an ancient  

Spanish castle, and enjoying the night life. We also  indulged our love of urbex visiting a creepy   abandoned house that unlocked itself at night and  an abandoned children’s tuberculosis sanatorium,   among other creepy places. Then we headed off to  Morocco, a country I’d never been to before.   

There was a traditional Berber pharmacy in Fez, full  of treasures, a city called Chefchaouen which was   entirely blue and full of fossils, snails at the market in Marakech, and a visit to Essaouira, the setting   for Game of Thrones, complete with Jimi Hendrix  Cafe. I went for a sunset beach ride before flying  

Back to Spain, this time to Malaga where I gorged  myself on churros, took a carriage ride, enjoyed the   beautiful park and soaked up some Spanish culture.  From Malaga, I flew back to Brussels for a few days   of unadulterated shopping and to fuel my unhealthy  slushy addiction. From there, my final flight  

Brought me home to Rwanda. It was the most lovely  year. It has been amazing. I got to go all through   Europe, I got to catch up with some wonderful  friends. I got to go and see my cousin in the  

Hague, I got to see my friends Madeline and Dom in Malaga, I got to see Maia and Taia in Spain, I got to see   Ruairí and Martine. I mean, I it was just amazing, and  to top it off I ended up in Morocco, which, you know,  

I’ve never been to North Africa before, so that  was fantastic. So, without further ado, it’s time   to make my oath for the year to come, and I’ve got  this beautiful, beautiful drinking horn which I   was amazingly lucky enough to find at Rwanda  Cow Horns, I’ll leave their link below, and they  

Made this for me a couple of days ago. It’s so  new that it still smells quite strongly. I washed   it out with bi-carb and the smell is going away, but  it’s fascinating because I’ve never had a freshly   made cow horn before, you know, I’ve always  bought them from shops, where they’ve been for  

A while. So, it’s traditional to drink mead from a  cow horn, and mead is like a sort of honey,   kind of, it’s sort of a bit stronger than a beer,  it’s more sort of a honey-made wine. Really, really nice.  

Heather mead, uh, lovely. That’s what you would  usually drink from one of these, but there isn’t   any mead, so for next year I’m hoping to make some  mead to drink from this. Another thing that is, you know, 

You can substitute that for is called scrumpy,  which is a type of apple cider which is a bit flat,   it’s not so fizzy, but there’s no scrumpy  here either, but what I did find is- we’ve got  

Savanna Dry Cider, yeah. So, I mean, it’ll do. [laughing] It will do. I’m not being fussy about this. So it’s about,   I guess, midday now. It’s time to start drinking,  and the most incredible, incredible thing that  

I discovered about this horn, is I liked the shape,  I got it because of the shape even before I knew   what colour it would be, and when you set it down  it actually sits perfectly upright! Because I was a bit  

Worried, it’s like, ‘oh no, I can only pour enough  that I can finish drinking,’ because usually you’d   do this in a group, and you’d pass it to the next  person, and the next person. You’d each take a drink  

Until you’ve finished, or like the drinking  horn that I bought for my nephew this year for   his birthday, it comes with a stand that you can  just stand it in, but of course I don’t have a  

Stand and I’m not with anybody [laughing]. So, I was like, ‘oh no, if I put anything in here I have to finish it,’ and   then I realised this. I realised that it actually  sits perfectly upright and keeps all of the  

Liquid in it. I mean, that- you couldn’t have planned that. That was amazing. [bottle opening] Mmm. Yeah, that smells right. That smells good. All right, so… I’ve got some cider in the drinking horn. Um, all right, so again, I mean, 

You’re only really supposed to make, like, one oath  but I think I’m going to do two again because I was   thinking about it and I like this idea of having  one creative, sort of, thing related to writing  

And one, kind of, personal goal just related to me.  So writing this year, or the creative side of it,   I’ve just had a sound booth built. Uh, a little  bit traumatic, but it has been done and so this  

Year I would like to record one of my books, like,  one of my older books, as an audiobook. So, that is   my goal is to attempt to record an entire audiobook  and hopefully release it. So, to the audiobook.

[laughing] I love this drinking horn. All right, the second one is I would like, by the end of this year, to   learn to ride a proper big motorbike, and to  have done, sort of, a road trip to Gisenyi to see  

My friends up there. So, at the beginning of  last year, 2023, I started to learn how to ride   a moto, a little motorbike, and I started on  an automatic scooter, and I’m now driving   around town on a semi-automatic motorbike.  It’s only, I think, it’s a 110 CC, so it’s a  

Small, small bike but it’s been perfect for  learning. I’ve dubbed it Binky after the, uh, the horse that Death rides in Terry Pratchett.  So, I’ve been riding around town on Binky the   motorbike and we’ve been having a lot of fun.  We went to get this cow horn together,

And so I kind of feel like I’m getting there,  I kind of feel like I’m getting the hang   of it and I would like to ride a proper proper  motorbike because, as much as I love Binky, I don’t  

Think I’m going to get all the way to Gisenyi on  Binky. I think the hills that you have to go up   to get there, I am more likely to start sliding  back down them on a 110. So, I think I need to  

Learn to ride a proper, proper big bike and to go  on a road trip. So, to learning to ride a proper morotbike. Okay, all right, so that’s my oath for the year. Both of them. Both of my oaths before  

My boast… that’s not easy to say. Okay, so my boast  for this year is an easy one. Easy one.    So, what I was really, really proud of having done  this year is related to the travel that I went on,

Is I ended up in Morocco and I knocked one of  the things off my bucket list that I’ve always wanted   to do. I’ve always wanted to ride a horse down a  beach at sunset, and never done it. I’ve ridden a  

Lot of horses, but never on a beach and never  at Sunset, and I just- it was just something I   always wanted to do. So, I found myself in Essaouira, which is on the Atlantic coast in Morocco, and  

They have the most amazing horse riding stable  there, and so I went for one horse ride just   to feel it out and see how I was going to do, because I hadn’t been riding in about  

Ten years, and then I went back for a proper two-hour  horse ride down the beach, and it was just- it was   amazing. It was just- it was brilliant. So, I’m so  proud of having ridden a horse down a beach at sunset. Okay… ooh, gassy.

Okay, so to wrap this up, my toast this year [sigh] okay, my toast this year has got to go to my two girl cats, Sophie and Sen, who  have had a really, really tough end to this year,

So Sen broke her leg, we don’t know how. She ended up  down the vet’s and she spent about… what? Three, four, five week weeks in a tiny, tiny little  cage while her leg’s been healing. It’s been   really tough, but she’s just been going like  a trooper. She’s really been an amazing cat.  

All the staff love her, she’s recovering really  well, so, you know, ouch. And the second one that   I will talk about in another video, because I haven’t  told you about this yet, but one of my other cats, 

My other girl cat Sophie, turned out to need some  real heavy-duty dental work done, and that has   also been a lot to deal with. So, both of my girl  cats, Sophie and Sen, have just been so strong at  

The end of this year. I mean, as cats go, they are  just the best, and so I’m going to toast to   their recovery. To Sophie and Sen, and a speedy  recovery, and a long life ahead. So, to Sophie and Sen.

All right, so that’s my oath, boast and  toast for the year, let me know below what   yours are. Let me know what you’re  going to do this year, let me know   what you’re proud of having done last  year, and raise a toast to something  

Or someone that you love. All right, I’ll see you in the next video. Happy 2024! [laughing]