Optimistic plan for delusion
If you woke up this morning beset with regrets, not to mention a churning stomach and a thumping head, don’t blame that last round of tequila shots at 3am: blame those do-gooding ancient Babylonians. They’re the ones who, thousands of years ago, invented the silly idea that we should begin every year with a list of noble resolutions: paying off debt, resowing the grain fields, sacrificing stuff to the gods and remembering to water the hanging gardens more often.
These are all lofty intentions, but where’s the fun in that? How disappointing it must be to be ‘‘Paleo’’ Pete Evans this morning, downing his acai berries and activated almonds before heading out for a surf, sans sunscreen, safe in the knowledge that his clean-eating, clean-living, chakrachanting lifestyle renders New Year’s resolutions redundant.
For the rest of us, however, it’s a satisfying tradition to begin each year emboldened with a to-do list imbued with equal parts of optimism and delusion. Things like: I will declutter my house, lose a few kilograms, eat less butter, throw out all the mismatched socks, alphabetise my dried spices, and return my library books on time.
Some years, my resolutions have proved life-changing. On this day a decade ago, back when I was editor of NZ Gardener magazine, I vowed to cut my weekly grocery bill to $10 a week – for pantry staples such as milk, cheese, flour, and sugar – and grow the rest of my food in my inner-city garden.
If I couldn’t grow it, I’d barter, forage, or swap my excess crops for cash at the local farmers’ market to pay for it.
During that year-long experiment in urban self-sufficiency, I taught myself to cook properly, turned wild elderberries into wine, and developed some excellent negotiating skills, convincing the local butcher to trade the occasional organic cauliflower for a slab of steak.
Other New Year’s resolutions are best forgotten, like the year I decided to invite my friends around every weekend for Sunday ‘‘drunch’’.
I’ve never been a morning person and rarely make it out for brunch, so a liquid lunch that dragged on until dinnertime seemed far better suited to my personality.
But as it turned out, we drunched only once, having discovered that a Monday morning hangover hurts twice as bad.
On this day last year, my sister and I strapped on our shiny new FitBits and set out to shed 16 kilograms in 2016. That didn’t happen.
‘‘How about we make it 17 in ‘17?’’ she joked over a second helping of chocolate log at Christmas. Meanwhile, I’ve been mulling over a meat-free resolution for 2017. I’m going to go mostly vegetarian.
I say mostly because I’m realistic. I’ll need a bacon buttie (or two) today and I don’t want to become one of those dietary irritants at dinner parties, plus my kids are too young, not to mention suspicious, to fob off with tofu sausages and zucchini-spaghetti bolognaise.
The last time I dabbled with vegetarianism, I was a teenager. Much to my dairy-farming parents’ angst, when I escaped to Australia as a 15-year-old Rotary exchange student, I told my host family I was a chickenatarian and they swallowed it.
As it is, I rarely eat pork, beef (except for free-range eye fillet served medium-rare at fancy restaurants) or lamb, even – or indeed especially – the cuts from our own farm.
Some people reckon it’s more ethical to eat animals you’ve raised yourself, knowing, as the food activist and author Michael Pollan once said, that they’ve had very happy lives with only one bad day.
But when you’ve seen that lamb bounce about in the paddock, or stroked that cow’s coat, and scratched that pig behind the ears, I find the opposite occurs. I lose my appetite to take their life.
My husband, who spent Christmas Eve carving up a couple of home-killed sheep with my brother-in-law, has no such qualms.
When I suggested I might turn vegetarian for a year, he responded with his characteristic oratory flair. ‘‘Don’t be a knob,’’ he said. I’m conflicted, too. Not because I’m a fair-weather friend to the animals on our farm but because my husband has made a New Year’s Resolution of his own.
Spurred on by Santa’s gift of two new non-stick frying pans, he’s promised to cook dinner every night of our summer holidays, and only a foolish feminist would object to that.
Other New Year's resolutions are best forgotten, like the year I decided to invite my friends around every weekend for Sunday "drunch" ... as it turned out, we drunched only once, having discovered that a Monday morning hangover hurts twice as bad.