Here’s a resolution that will not go up in smoke

THE nation may have a worried look on its face as it stares into the new year. But let’s be honest, trepidation is normal every January.

A hundred years ago in 1919, you might have expected expectations to be high. The Great War – the war to end all wars – had ended two months previously and the new year at least promised a fresh start. Except it was fraught with trouble and strife.

And there were echoes back then of problems we

Istill have now, in Ireland and Europe. The Irish question was a thorny issue three years after the Dublin uprising. A Sinn Fein government in the Irish capital declared its independence and the Irish Volunteers and Irish Republican Army became more active.

The Spanish flu epidemic, that had killed more worldwide than the Great War, returned at the start of a year that was to be one of civil unrest.

Servicemen mutinied over the slowness of CANNOT honestly recall ever making a new year resolution. Except the obvious one that follows the New Year’s Eve the night before and you wake up with a stomach like Vesuvius and little men using sledge hammers in your head and you say ‘never again’.

The last time that happened was when I was slipped a Mickey Finn and I’m not surprised Mickey didn’t want it. It was lethal and I woke up embracing a bucket. Which was thoughtful of someone. Those days are long gone. January 1, of course, is a good date to start a resolution. Much better than starting on March 23 say, which most people are bound to forget, unless it happens to be their birthday. Starting a resolution today allows you to keep an easy tally of how you are doing.

But do people still make them? A friend of mine is giving up daily treats such as chocolate and will put so much money away each day, which will be donated to a charity at the end of the month. All being well, she will continue her new regime, become that bit more healthy, and help those less fortunate than herself. Which seems worthwhile.

Not that purely personal goals fail the social acceptability test.

Regular resolutions I found on a news website can range from drinking less to looking for a new demobilisation, race riots led to deaths in Cardiff and Liverpool, even the police went on strike. Thirty million working days were lost to strikes.

The Treaty of Versailles was signed that imposed the debt and restrictions on Germany, which divided Europe and helped Hitler and the far-right’s rise to power. The peace it imposed was to last only 20 years: the war to end all wars had been misnamed.

The year of Brexit couldn’t be any worse. Could it? job, getting fit to finding love, saving money to losing weight. It can be as nebulous as enjoying life or helping others.

The perennial list-topper has to be to stop smoking, because everybody now knows that cigarettes kill, although many have stopped with the help of e-cigarettes.

As a non-smoker, it makes me reflect on those days, not so long ago, when you could cut the smoke in a pub or cinema with a knife. The nicotine haze gave black and white films a sepia look and ceilings in the public bar were usually stained burnt sienna. If it did that to a ceiling, what did it do to your lungs?

I am not nostalgic for a past when passive smoking was obligatory but I do have sympathy for those for whom the addiction is still so strong you see them standing outside licensed premises in arctic weather all for the sake of a fag.

Maybe time for a new year resolution?