Bloody, bold and resolute

Welcome back, everyone. I hope you have enjoyed the break and are now looking forward to 2012 with wide-eyed excitement/terrible glee/unmitigated despondency (delete according to character type and personal preference).

It being the first day of the new year, I thought it would be appropriate to talk a little bit about resolutions. For this is, of course, the perfect – or at least traditional – time to cast away old habits and form shiny new ones. Now, if ever, is the moment to resolve to eat my greens, go for a healthy refreshing run every morning and be nice to everyone, even if I don’t feel like it. Right?

Well, no. Because I came to the conclusion some years ago that making resolutions is thankless, fruitless and pointless. Mainly, it has to be said, because I never keep them. A list of resolutions in January is the perfect recipe for misery and self-disgust in December. In the past I would come up with ten or twelve things I wanted to get done during the year, then concentrate all my efforts on the one I was really interested in. And I’m not convinced that the virtuous feeling I got when I wrote down things like ‘keep the house tidy’ or ‘stop eating so much chocolate’ was worth the subsequent and rapid realisation that it was never going to happen.

So this year, I’ve decided to take a different approach. There’s just one thing I want to do: write every day. No matter how busy, how tired or how unimaginative I feel, I want to get some words down. And I’m not going to look at it as a resolution so much as an inevitability. Because I know how easy it is to slip into days, even weeks where the notebook remains closed and the laptop gathers dust. And the one thing I don’t want from 2012 is to look back and wish I’d done more.

Of course, it’s not going to be straightforward. As some of you already know, my partner and I are expecting a new addition to the household later this year, which won’t exactly make it easier to find time for writing. But even if I can only manage a sentence a day, at least I’ll have done something. At least I won’t let whole months go by in which I realise I haven’t achieved anything at all.

So, that’s the plan. I’ll let you know how I get on. And in the meantime, best of luck with all your resolutions – if, that is, you chose to make any.