It’s a funny old world: Jane Wenham-Jones
‘Winter is best suited to hours spent supine on the sofa with a large sherry’
If one is to believe Google, the top New Year resolutions made by women across the country barely vary from year to year. Most of us want to eat better, exercise more, look vaguely presentable or learn a new skill.
Sales of gym memberships, diet books and those weird strips of rubber that promise to turn you from an untoned blob into Pamela
Anderson in just five minutes a day, go through the roof in January, but I, for one, will not be buying them.
I’ve nothing against weight-loss books (I’ve written rather a jolly one, involving chocolate, myself) but I’ve come to realise that if I was meant to be the sort of person who gets up at 5.30am to do Ashtanga yoga before a breakfast of puréed broccoli, I’d probably have embraced it in July.
January is a rotten time to be living on raw veg. It’s too cold and dark – and there might be Quality Street left over from Christmas. Winter is best suited to hours spent supine on the sofa with a large sherry and the promise of a baked potato, so it makes much more sense to direct
one’s fitness endeavours towards the moment when summer looms and you are facing the annual crisis of unwrapping a winter-white
body to find an extra chin and arms like a pair of slugs.
If you must embark on the self-improvement journey early, positives are easier to keep to than negatives. If you pledge to munch on a carrot a day, you have a much better chance of sticking to it than if you promise never again to buy cake. I once pledged to make a regular smoothie of spinach and strawberries for elevenses, and it went on for three weeks – but when I left crisps off the shopping list just once, I got such severe salt cravings, I needed to have a lie-down.
In 2018, I was going to learn the piano, take daily, online French lessons and work through an entire book about the magic of tidying.
I managed to nail the first six notes of jazz standard Take Five, but the only French phrases I retained were
‘Passez-moi le vin’ (‘Pass me the
wine’) and ‘Je suis plutôt grosse et
fatiguée’ (‘I am rather fat and tired’). On the sorting front, my airing cupboard is still a thing of beauty,
my lipsticks are all in one box, and the socks are paired. That just leaves 77 assorted drawers and shelves still to tackle…
I tried to implement a system whereby family members made resolutions. My son, I suggested, could occasionally take the bins out and stop putting empty cartons back in the fridge. My husband might throw away used teabags instead of leaving them scattered across the draining board. This concept fell apart when they offered reciprocal ideas. ‘You could give up shouting,’ my husband said wearily. ‘And stop being annoying,’ the boy added.
The sad truth is that, after decades of ‘New Year, New Me’ plans, I’m the same podgy, grumpy, unmusical, disorganised, uni-lingual ‘old me’ I was when I started. So, for 2019, my resolution is: ‘No more resolutions’.