KEY POINTS:
Don't get me wrong: I'm into self-improvement in a vague "so long as it doesn't hurt" kind of way. I also believe in all levels of self-monitoring, from "do I have spinach in my teeth?" to "am I essentially unlovable?" even when it becomes clear the answers to these questions are "yes" and "um, yes". However, the New Year's resolution thing I've come to resent slightly.
New Year's resolutions are fine when you are children and your list says things such as "run errands for Mummy" or "be kind to the girl at school who smells powerfully of urine". All this tilts your fledgling personality in the right direction.
However, as an adult, it goes beyond errands and Brownie-type yearnings. These are just childish puddles of guilt (over the rubbish small person you are) and hope (for a "better you" to come).
What we can never know as children is that, fast-forward a decade or several, and those puddles will become dark and thrashing waters of confusion, strife and recrimination.
Bearing that in mind, it's a brave adult who would want anything to do with resolutions. For most of us, a genuinely comprehensive list (faults to be rectified; amends to be made; court cases to be avoided) would be a foul spaghetti of contradictions and lies.
And anyway, it's New Year, a time to make merry - what kind of masochistic twit would want to spend it making a big list of everything that's wrong with them?
"Hey, come and have a New Year's drink." "Thanks, I will, but first let me finish working out exactly why I'm hated." That, and the fact most resolutions perish before you've fly-tipped the Christmas tree comprise my second-biggest reason to dispense with New Year's resolutions. My first reason being: been there, done that, proved myself. In short, I'm off the hook.
Last year, I managed to keep my New Year's resolution - to give up smoking. Not only did I give up last November (hence beating the New Year's rush), to the astonishment of all the doubters I managed to stay given up.
A perplexing situation quite different to all the fake giving-ups of before. And not all of it positive.
Having chugged away like the Orient Express for countless aeons, there can be no smug bliss at having avoided disease, just uneasy relief at having avoided it so far. Same goes with getting back my sense of taste. What's the point? I'm only wasting it on Mini Cheddars and Jaffa Cakes.
As for sense of smell, I once thought it my naughty secret to have a crafty fag on the fire escape before leaving the house in the morning. So imagine my horror, when my nose worked again, on realising that all that time I'd been greeting other mums on the nursery run smelling like Amy Winehouse's hen night.
I also feel I've let the side down - the side being iconic dead smokers I never met, who probably would have hated me, but for whom I always felt kinship, maybe because I figured they could always be relied upon for a light (Peter Cook, Humphrey Bogart, Jeffrey Bernard).
And don't even get me started about missing out on "smirting" (smokers flirting). These days smokers are having a hoot, crackling with sexual energy on pavements outside offices, bars and restaurants.
All very unfair. In my smoking days, the most interaction you got were cries of: "Shut the door - you're letting the cold in." Saddest of all, my still-smoking partner has become a stranger to me: just a dark shape in the garden under the patio heater (with me inside moaning: "Shut the door - you're letting the cold in"). One could go on, but successfully giving up smoking is not all it's cracked up to be.
Saying that, it's nice not to wake up every morning hacking away like a broken lawnmower. And, lest we forget, of all the NYRs, giving up smoking is the design classic, the one people usually fail at.
Ergo, having accomplished it, I reckon I'm absolved of ever having to attempt anything as boring and pointless as a resolution again. It all makes perfect sense to me, so kindly restrain yourselves from writing in to disagree - I'll be busy outside on the pavement, sighing wistfully, watching other people have a fag.
- OBSERVER
