FINDING MOLLY

Our diarist is ditching New Year resolutions in favour of an approach that seems much more promising…

Dear Diary

Happy New Year… although I always find New Year a bit depressing, do you? It’s as if all the fun of Christmas gets switched off too soon and brutally. One minute you’re singing Auld Lang Syne and the next minute you’re shoving your baubles back into the loft and the house looks all bare and sad.

We always have a burning of the Christmas tree ceremony on Twelfth Night. I think it was something my dad made up to give me some postChristmas excitement. He’d drag the tree down to the bottom of the garden and set it alight and we’d watch the flames while eating a hot dog made from sausages out of a tin, and I could make as many wishes as I liked while the fire raged. I’m not sure any of them ever came true (ie that I would be best friends with Bros and grow really long legs and make my awful maths teacher Miss Heywood faint by getting full marks in a test) but it was lovely just standing there with Dad around our mini bonfire.

This year Guy said he’d like to get a decent job more than anything, and Rob wished that someone else would write his essay on fideism in the epistemology of religion (??? – me neither!) There was no point wishing that my dad would suddenly appear with a hot dog but I wanted that more than anything.

Do you make New Year resolutions? Some people really get off on that new year/new start thingy, which is all well and good if you haven’t broken them all by five past midnight like I usually do. As soon as I’ve written them I feel the pressure and weight of expectation start to mount in my head.

They’re always the same ‘I’m going to’s: I’m going to drink more water, do couch to 5k (still on the couch stage – though I can do couch to kitchen really well), I’m going to woman up and tell the window cleaner to do the corners – blimey, he charges enough. I’m going to join a yoga class. I’m going to lose loads of weight… yada yada.

Now when we were sitting having Christmas dinner (which was lovely by the way. And I did buy the boys some daft presents and they loved them. And my friend Carole was the BEST company but WORST karaoke singer ever), Carole said that she never makes resolutions any more, she compiles a cosmic wish list which is basically a list of everything she wants to happen in the coming year. OK, so she didn’t quite get Jason Momoa hammering her door down last year, but she did get the silver Mercedes and the fuller lips (courtesy of the Get Pout clinic in town) and increased company profits and the contract she was chasing. She got me thinking maybe that’s what I should do, so I sat down and wrote my requests. As per her instructions, I was to be totally selfish and not ask for world peace or that the hole in the ozone layer would close up – and to be firm, to show the Cosmos who’s boss.

I wasn’t greedy – I mean, I didn’t ask for a twenty-million lottery win – but I did ask for my little Paper Girl business to take off somehow. And I’d also like to be able to fit into that lovely red dress that I bought in the January sale five years ago. It was far too small and I intended to slim into it but it just hangs on its hanger taunting me.

A better car would be good instead of my old rust-bucket. And as my big ask… I got all nervous and excited writing this one down: that I DEMAND to have a close encounter with Mr Audi sooner rather than later.

Mr Audi – I’ve got so used to calling him that, I keep forgetting that I now know his real name is Dr Patrick Ferrino – lovely isn’t it? I had a moment of being thirteen again and scribbled Mrs Molly Ferrino on a notepad to see what it looked like. I imagined a church wedding, me in a silk white dress walking down the aisle carrying a massive teardrop bouquet of perfumed red roses. Talk about getting carried away! Cosmos – for now, I’ll settle for a date with Mr Audi, pretty please. Just one will do.

And I’ll take it from there.

Love, Molly

NEXT MONTH: Milly receives an invitation to her friend Mary’s dinner party and is thrilled to discover Mr Audi will be in attendance, too...