Why 2013 is a skip year, not a leap year

We’re used to leap years, but what about skip years? The general opinion is that 2013 is a year to skip – here in Scotland the plan seems to be to keep our heads down and get through the year with the focus on the build up to 2014 (Commonwealth Games, independence vote).

Others are calling it the Empty Year. Go visit empty13 to find out what advertising and media industry types think about 2013 – fascinating insight, many ideas, plenty of predictions and lots of ‘big data’ (winner of the 2012 Snarketing 2.0 Most Annoying Buzzword of the Year ).

I spent much of 2012 sitting at home with the lights off pretending I was out when the Jubilee and Olympics came knocking (I watched the Olympic football at Hampden but only as a favour to a friend so the tickets wouldn’t go to waste. Honest guv’nr, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it).

So in my opinion the less officially sanctioned highlights and organised fun during 2013 the better.

But perhaps we need to stop waiting for ‘someone’ to come along and fill the year. Maybe we need to take responsibility to make things happen.

If not we’ll end up with the Hogmanay effect lingering long into the new year.

The Hogmanay effect is a bit like the bystander effect – the more people in a crowd, the less likely any one person will break away and intervene in an emergency – but the result is more of a ‘well this is awkward’ standing around looking at each other as the bells chime midnight. As the fireworks went off over Edinburgh castle, the crowd I was amongst didn’t spontaneously burst into Auld Lang Syne. There wasn’t even much kissing, embracing and the only handshake was offered by a confused child. Instead people turned to each other expectantly, waiting for ‘someone’ to kick off the celebrations. It didn’t happen, but it could have if ‘someone’ had broken into a dashing white sergeant. Instead the crowd evaporated faster than Scotch mist.

We hear a lot about the wisdom of crowds . Sometimes we lose sight of the value of the individual.

It’s time to independently decide what 2013 will mean to you. If you don’t it’ll go down in history as the Year of Natural Scotland  and not a whole lot else.

Since we’re all hanging around waiting for 2014 to happen I’ve started work on a couple of side projects – unrelated to copywriting or marketing services. Well, it passes the time, doesn’t it?