The way we live now Vive la résolution?

Old hand Christopher Howse laments the unintended consequences of New Year’s resolutions – but young gun Guy Kelly can’t resist making a few

New Year’s resolutions are to the British much like learning foreign languages. We boast of failure. ‘Oh, I spent nine years from the age of seven learning French, and, do you know, I can’t even order a cup of coffee.’ The resolution boast is: ‘I polished off a halfpound bar of Wholenut on 2 January. So that worked well.’

I think it likely that a day will soon be dedicated to the ‘survivors’ of New Year’s resolutions – not the resolvers but family, friends and strangers affected. I resolved not long ago to seek an opportunity to help someone each day. It sounds a hopelessly vague plan, but I soon found victims, regardless of their fate, jostling to be helped, like pigeons among whom word has got round that a Mcdonald’s French fries container has shed its load on the junction of the A302 and the A3214.

Since my hobby is pottering around cathedral cities in Spain, I know the dangers of offering help. Without wishing to propagate a stereotype, I’ve found Spaniards keen to proffer directions; if they don’t know the way, they increase the confidence with which they give them. This is not a practical joke, but an attempt to donate whatever they can, as if an erroneous direction were like giving away a 20-céntimo coin instead of a euro.

So when a woman asked me the way to the Passport Office, I hesitated. I know exactly where the Passport Office is. It was just that I could not apply my hippocampus rapidly to sketching the best route. My apologies became so pitiful that she ended up consoling me.

Buggies proved another bugbear. Folding pushchairs (as I still think of them) with infants aboard must often be lifted into trains. Unless you know which bit of the apparatus to grab while the mother holds the handle, you risk catapulting the baby into the gap between train and platform. This is seldom welcome. But I refused to be cowed, and have so far only injured one knee (of my own) in such operations.

I still don’t know what my resolution for 2023 will be, but everyone else must resolve not to mind the consequences.

The great thing about never achieving your resolutions is that you can just roll them over. With that in mind, here are mine for 2023 – and 2022, 2021, 2020…

1. Get a life. I’ve been looking for a decent hobby for ages now. It needs to be interesting – a few years ago I landed on running, objectively the most boring interest – and it needs to be cheap. I am thinking of homing-pigeon husbandry, blacksmithing or learning the organ. Are those cheap? I have no idea.

2. Become famous for one dish. I am a perfectly OK cook, and content with staying at that level, purely because I couldn’t bear to be described as a ‘foodie’. The ceiling of my ambition is to be known for one dish I have inexplicably perfected: ‘Guy, you could do your legendary X!’ The problem is that I have no idea what X should be. So legendary status eludes me.

3. Complete the Knowledge. I don’t drive a black cab, nor even own a car. But I do get a near sexual thrill out of knowing my way around London better than people I’m talking to. ‘Please, we have no need for that,’ I’ll say, calmly placing my hand over a friend’s phone screen when they try to use Citymapper. ‘I will guide us home… on foot.’ It’s immensely annoying, this hipster Gandalf act. Imagine how much more annoying I could be if I had the Knowledge under my belt.

4. Stop walking into people. You know when you’re walking towards someone and switch paths to avoid a collision, but you both go the same way, so you end up locked in a little dance of sorries, jerking about until someone seizes the initiative and ploughs on through? That happens to me a lot. Too much. And I’m never the initiativeseizer. So whatever happens, I’m sticking to the left side this year.

5. Know what the hell everyone is on about. Here is a list of things people are always banging on about, but I have never bothered investigating. I just smile, nod and go, ‘Right, right. Oh God, so true. I hate that? Or… love it?’ Ted Lasso, the Metaverse, craft beer, James Cleverly MP, mortgages, cats, and the Kent town of Deal. This year, I hope to form opinions on them all.