What is the point of making resolutions now?

Pushing ourselves to give up pleasures when our lives have been put on hold is pure masochism

I’m not making any new year’s resolutions. It’s a Puritan invention. The celebration of a new year is very old, but it’s meant to land in the middle of the medieval Christmas festival, not bring it to a grinding halt. It’s Christmas until January 6, still midwinter, still cold and dark – so the idea that this is the time to give up booze and rich food is madness.

Of course, that’s almost exactly what Public Health England advises. Launching a joyless Better Health campaign (one immediately feels sick), the quango complains that we snacked and smoked and drank our way through 2020, and we need to do something about it. But this only piles masochism onto misery and the reality is that there is no “new year”. We are still stuck in the world of the old one.

Twenty-twenty closed on a dopamine high: we left the EU and a new vaccine was approved. But things will get worse before they get better. We are already in the middle of our second great wave and we are due more restrictions not fewer, especially as the Government can now portray them as “one last heave” regardless of the damage done to business or private life. I imagine that in Tier 5, Matt Hancock comes round and superglues you to the living room floor.

Vaccines, far from heralding the immediate end of lockdown, will be used to justify it, which would be tolerable if we were guaranteed a swift and painless roll-out, but that’s not on the horizon. It’s estimated that today around 500,000 Oxford-astrazeneca doses are in place as we move towards our goal of two million innoculations a week, but the NHS counts around 20 million of us as “at risk” of seasonal influenza, so a back-of-the-fag-packet calculation suggests we’ll be waiting at least two months before the vulnerable are covered. There is room to upscale, Tony Blair’s right about that, but given the shortcomings of testing or hospital capacity, scepticism about the NHS’S ability to do it is justified.

The experience of America, where the effort is managed by the states, is worth study. Their ambition was to inoculate 20 million by the end of December; 14 million doses were sent out but, as of New Year’s Eve, only 2.8 million had been used. Staff shortages were commonly blamed, along with storage issues, and a curious reluctance of some health workers to take part (60 per cent of nursing home staff in Ohio who were offered a jab turned it down). One success story is West Virginia, which provided first-round injections to willing workers and residents at 214 long-term care facilities and is now offering the same service to teachers over 50. Could this be a way out of our schools closure crisis: give teachers the vaccines first?

We have got to be hopeful, otherwise we despair, but steel yourself for failure, delay and the knowledge that we will be sitting on our backsides for a while yet. In that context, I think pushing oneself to give up pleasure, wallowing in guilt, is psychologically unhealthy and puts too much onus on individuals who, at this moment in time, are not in control of their own lives. I’m not sure I’ve kept a single resolution I ever made anyway. If I had, I’d be healthier, better read and have a body like a Greek god.

Covid is an exercise in submission. My friends who have resisted the situation – either in terror of disease or disbelief that it could be that bad – seem less healthy, in mind at least, than those who surrendered to the inevitable. I take my lead from the brown bear. Winter is for eating and sleeping. Save the diet for spring.

Perhaps PHE should run a campaign against bad television. It’s telling that this Christmas, in the midst of a pandemic, when people were stuck indoors with nothing else to do, they still didn’t turn on the telly. Ratings were down across the board. Overnight totals for the Doctor Who new year special were reportedly a tragic

4.7 million (down from 5.15 million in 2019), beaten by the five million who tuned in to find out who clobbered Adam Barlow on Coronation Street. I expected an Orient Express- style reveal: they all did it, with an unseemly dash for the front of the queue.

My Doctor Who source tells me that the production office is a mess and that even BBC bigwigs recognise there’s a problem. Producer Chris Chibnall has made a dog’s dinner of the show, the new season now cut from 11 episodes to eight (blamed on health and safety, but I don’t believe a word of it). With a shrinking general audience, Doctor Who is in hock to its weirdo fan base: it is obsessed with its past and yet doesn’t seem like itself anymore. The casting of Jodie Whittaker was the single greatest disaster in film since the Bond producers decided George Lazenby looked good in a kilt.

The last time the show was this bad was in the Eighties, and it was cancelled. My prediction is that they will regenerate Whittaker at the end of this season or the beginning of the next and return to a male, but as I would like the show to die, and as we have established Doctor Who can turn into anything, I’d end it on a postmodern note and have him regenerate into a Dyson vacuum cleaner. Awkward silence. Credits roll. “Diddily-dum, de diddly-dum, de diddly-dum, de dee-dee...”