A date with Sarah-Kate; Kate’s home truths

Sarah-Kate turns her problems into a plus

As I’ve already leaped ahead of the crowds and done my post-festive season detox, I see no reason not to make some New Year’s resolutions.

Not that I believe in them. But maybe the part I don’t believe in is the New Year bit. So perhaps by making them weeks in advance, they’ll stick for once.

Although I did eventually give up smoking and I’m sure I eat fewer carbs. (Mind you, if God didn’t want us to eat carbs, She would not have invented potato chips.)

This year, or next, depending on how much of a stickler you are, I would like to give up worrying. I’m pretty sure it’s been on the list for a decade or three but, seriously, enough already.

There’s just been one too many sleepless nights tossing and turning, fretting about all the usual things – money, family, relationships, careers, the future. Worse, I think you get to a point, around 3am, when you actually run out of big things to worry about so you start on smaller ones.

Like how, with your current schedule, are you going to get to the dry cleaners to pick up the thing you should have hand-washed but which spent a year at the bottom of the laundry basket before you decided it was the only thing you could possibly wear to the work do next week?

Or who should take what to the January camping trip to the back of beyond that you agreed to organise one night after too many cosmopolitans which is now vastly oversubscribed with people you don’t know and don’t want to?

Or whether you should admit to yourself that the shoes you bought on sale, but which were still stupidly expensive, are indeed half a size too small especially on the left foot?

Or if it’s possible to lose 10 kilos between now and Christmas even though you have 42 parties to go to and your only menopausal symptom so far has been an inability to walk past a pastry, even an inferior one?

The answers to the above in the cold light of day, by the way, are clear as crystal. Wear something else. Pull out of the trip. Half a size won’t kill you. And no.

So I think the trick is, in the middle of the night, to see if you can reverse engineer your thinking and concentrate on what doesn’t worry you.

Gratitude is for sure the new black, if not anywhere near so slimming, but it is something of an antidote to worry, so during a recent sleepless night I thought I’d try coming up with a list of things to be thankful for.

The list was short to begin with.

I have a lovely husband although he was snoring at the time and I wanted to bash his head in if you must know, but he doesn’t do it on purpose and when he’s awake, he’s very doting.

I live in New Zealand and feel lucky to come from here. It rains too much but my roses love it.

In terms of not worrying, it’s a start. And then there are potato chips.