New Year Solutions

Happy New Year to all my friends and family. Let us hope 2025 will prove both Nostradamus and Baba Vanga wrong. They have prophesied apocalypse this year. On that cheerful note let me tell you about my New Year resolutions – sorry solutions.

Every year, I make New Year resolutions and every year I break them after a few months, sometimes weeks. The main problem is that it becomes an all or nothing endeavour. I will not eat chocolates, I will not consume alcohol, I will go to the gym 7 days a week, I will write a minimum of 500 words daily, and so on. In short, my resolutions are designed to fail and they invariably do. I know I shouldn’t be eating sweets because I have diabetes. Someone said to me the other day, ‘You will go blind if you eat so many sweets.’ The riposte that popped up in my head was, ‘Sweets would still taste delightful.’

But seriously, I need to get rid of that sweet tooth. The quality of my sleep is better if I don’t consume any alcohol. I am overweight and the case for sweating it out in the gym is very strong. I wish to improve my writing – so, as many writers tell me, I must write something every day, even if it’s crap. My resolutions, as you can see, are well intended. However, they simply don’t work.

The pattern is the same every year. I am resolute in achieving my goals. Weeks pass. Counter arguments to defeat my resolutions gradually line up like some superior army against an already weak and demoralised enemy. The eastern concept that everything is an illusion (ergo nothing matters) join forces with its unlikely bed fellows – the existentialist tenets of the west – freedom of choice and individual responsibility. The first casualty is usually the anti-sweet pledge. I pop one measly chocolate bar into my mouth and the rest of the resolutions come tumbling down like a house of cards. Excessive drinking becomes a routine (in my case one or two glasses of wine a day), I forget the way to the gym and the realisation that writing without being inspired is not something I am able to do! I am back to square one.

A wise friend of mine from Sheffield told me one year that his only New Year resolution was to drink more red wine. He did not say he intended to reduce his white wine consumption proportionately. I had just assumed that to be a given. Only last evening, did I realise that I could have been wrong all these years. His was a New Year solution not a resolution. I have, therefore, decided to decapitate the word, remove the ‘re’ from resolution. Like the mythical Phoenix, the solution has emerged from the ashes of broken self-promises: no New Year resolutions this year, just less of everything.