Belinda Beckett (Columnist)
I HAVE just one resolution for New Year 2015 and that’s to stop making them.
I’m already on the road to hell, so why bother paving it with good intentions?
Anyway, resolutions are just guilt trips just waiting to happen. Statistically, only 8% of us actually keep them.
Take dieting… although I’d rather not. You start weighing lettuce leaves, you drop a dress size, you celebrate with the remains of the Christmas Quality Street and, before you know it, you’re back on the scales where you started, with added interest.
My weight has crept up by an average of one British Imperial pound per year, whatever fad diet I try. It only slowed down when I came to metric Spain because it takes twice as long to gain a kilo.
All this ballooning up and down has the worst possible effect on the skin – and if you’ve got any balloons still hanging around from the yuletide festivities, you’ll know what I mean.
I’m not giving up alcohol either. The tubo of beer I look forward to at lunch time, the G&T before dinner, the wine with it and the tot of brandy afterwards have kept me out of the funny farm. Shrinks cost money and I’m not in BUPA. End of story.
Forget giving up smoking too. Santa brought me a very nice e-cigarette for Christmas, and I’ve got ten cartons of flavoured fluids to get through first!
Take up a hobby? I have. Vaping’s a hobby, they have clubs for it!
Get in shape? I am. Round is a shape!
Do charity work? I do, of sorts. Half my wardrobe is hanging in the local branch of Cudeca because it no longer fits me.
Be more honest? I know someone who was twice sued and once divorced trying to keep that one.
Besides, not a lot of people know that the Oxford Dictionary has other definitions for the word ‘resolve’, which are quite opposite to its popular meaning: ‘dissolve’, ‘disintegrate’, ‘dissipate’ … which is exactly what happens to resolutions and the people who make them.
Prolonged abstinence dissolves the resolve, disintegrates the integrity and ultimately (when you realise that deciding to give up giving up is the only promise you’re likely to keep), leads to large-scale dissipation. Another double Baileys please.
And if you look up ‘dissipation’, your Oxford Dictionary will confirm that it means ‘a frivolous or dissolute way of life’.
Mmm. I’ll have some of that, too!
Five resolutions I am training my moggies to keep
· We will not sit on the computer keyboard ‘delete all’ button
· We will not throw up fur balls in Mum’s slippers
· We will not speed dial Dad’s family in New Zealand
· We will not pretend to be a herd of wildebeest stampeding across the Serengeti Plains on any human’s bed while they’re asleep
· We will eat the cheaper cat food
