Here’s to A Fresh New Year

Start this New Year as you mean to go on, with a resolution to be happy and healthy

NEVER have we craved a New Year as much as 2021. Adios 2020! Making New Year’s resolutions often seems like a waste of time, but we need to make the effort. Now more than ever, we need to dust ourselves off and start over.

If 2020 has given us anything, it’s resilience. Resilience that we never knew we had. For me and many businesses in hospitality, tourism, entertainment or the arts, we will have faced our hardest challenges yet.

But we have to move forward and make the most of even the worst situations. So this Christmas I’ve given in to something I’ve been fighting for years.

For my daughter’s birthday and Christmas – she is my little panettone, born on December 25 – and my husband Victor’s gift for the next 20 years at least, I have agreed that we could get a dog. The family now has a puppy!

I’ve never been good with pets, other than goldfish, but they have been yearning for a dog for years. Finally, this year I thought, why resist? Life has been hard enough. If my darlings want the responsibility of a pet, who am I to spoil their fun.

This was one battle and one emotion I wasn’t prepared to fight any longer, but I’m certainly handing over all responsibility to the father and daughter doggy duo.

So my learning for 2021, is to step away from your comfort zone. Don’t try to control things that are out of your hands. And as a pleasing bonus, that puppy will make my two loved ones putty in my hands! Not that I had an ulterior motive…

They’re all smiles. And this happiness will spill over and we’ll all be better off for it. Since the dog has the beef and the bone, we’ll be eating vegetables for January. It is Veganuary, after all, and it’s good for the planet if we all eat a little less meat.

Here’s a favourite recipe from Contini George Street that is much loved – dare I say as much as my family now love their puppy!