Chinese New Year and the Rooster

In just under a month’s time it will be Chinese New Year (10^th February).  According to the Chinese horoscope, roosters like me can have great achievements in 2013 and overall it can be a smooth year.  I like the sound of that, a smooth year is just the kind of year I’d enjoy.

Career-wise it’s predicted to be a year when promotion is possible but I’m not really sure about this one. I’ve worked and studied for a very long time to achieve my present post, I enjoy the work but the nature of the role and the people I work with have always been more important than status or title.  Those things are just words, they have no real meaning.

On the wealth front, investing in children’s study is suggested to be productive and that’s a good thing because my son’s study will continue for 5 more years and is undoubtedly a significant investment, financially for us and intellectually for him.  Saving money this year is also highlighted so it’s helpful that being prudent is on my things to do list, just in case of a rainy day.

On the health front it’s said roosters who have chronic diseases will get better this year although they still need to take some regular medicine in case…. In case of what I’m not quite sure but anything that involves getting better sounds good to me.

All in all the Chinese New Year looks quite positive for us rooster folks although I suspect I have more in common with the iron chicken from the Clangers than the glorious Chinese rooster.  For anyone unfamiliar with the Clangers, it was a 1970’s television programme and for several years it was part of my favourite pre-school viewing. I was only five or six years old back then; little mouse-like creatures who found a solution to the various problems they encountered seemed perfectly possible and the fact that they lived on another planet was completely irrelevant.

Clangers are not unlike knitted pink almost hairless mice who live in peace and harmony inside a hollow blue planet far away from Earth. The planet is cratered and looks a bit like the moon.  It has musical trees and is frequently hit by meteors so Clangers live inside the planet and protect themselves by fixing dustbin lids to their burrows.  They communicate by whistling to each other; eat blue string pudding and a green soup collected from volcanic soup wells by their friend the Soup Dragon.

The iron chicken is a bird made of scrap metal who lives in an orbiting nest of metallic junk. One day the Clangers accidentally shoot her down with a firework.  After gathering together all her parts they rebuild her but the iron chicken causes chaos by eating the copper trees, putting her head into the soup well and consuming the Clanger’s blue string pudding.  Before flying back to her nest she lays a metal egg and gives it to the Clangers as a gift.

The iron chicken and I seem to have some uncanny similarities. I’ve often joked that I was put together with sticky tape and string from bits and bobs left over after other people were made.  Last year I was partially rebuilt and this year I’ll be de-constructed and reconstructed again.  From time to time in the last few months I’ve lived on a strange diet and although I haven’t had cause to eat copper or string, green soup has been on the menu more than once.  With any luck my similarities with the iron chicken end there because I don’t fancy being shot down by a stray rocket any time soon even if the Clangers might come along and rebuild me!