Merry Christmas just gone! I hope you enjoyed it hugely/survived it mentally intact, or any of the many points in between, commensurate with your family situation and the number of people you wouldn’t p*** on if they were on fire who were unavoidably around your dinner table. It’s over now. Relax.
Let us turn our thoughts to the year to come, which means turning our thoughts also to the year down whose final straight we are currently staggering. And here I find myself in an unusual – unprecedented, actually – and frankly deeply disconcerting position. Because for the first time in my life (and in any of the lives around me that I know enough about to feel confident of pronouncing upon them) I have achieved most of the new year’s resolutions I made last January.
I have lost weight. Courtesy of Mounjaro rather than willpower, but I’ve re-read the small print and nowhere did I say that it had to be done in a morally sound way, so it still counts. An achievement that has eluded me for decades is now officially achieved and yah boo sucks to my honour, ethics and metabolism. I vanquished you all for £200 a month and plan to continue to do so throughout 2026 an’ all.
I have started exercising. To an absurdly small degree, I grant you, as outlined in a recent column in this very organ. But again, another endeavour that has escaped me for 30 years is now underway. I run in tiny, tiny little bits and I plan to run in slightly longer bits, possibly even with a view to occasionally joining them up and making them longer still in the year to come.
I turned the television off and read more. I have managed 119 books this year (not including the ones I did not take to and, following a resolution made several years ago when I came to terms with the thoroughly objectionable truth that I was not getting any younger, laid aside without finishing) and may make it a nice round 120 before December is out.
We went out less to eat and I cooked better food for my rotten family. I now have nearly eight recipes in my repertoire, covering all the food groups and most of the vitamins. My 14-year-old son can knock up a decent cacio e pepe in between times and is keen to learn more. My husband remains, as a cook, a very good washer-upper. But each to his and her own. All I have to do now is learn to enjoy it and not sit down to every meal in a state of frothing fury at the need of the human body to partake of sustenance at regular intervals every sodding day til the end of time.
I would like 2026 to become the year I do things with love instead of rage. But we’ll see. Love/rage goal aside, it feels very strange to feel – no, to hell with it! Not feel – know! – that I have accomplished something. Somethings plural, in fact. How often do we get to feel a sense of genuine achievement these days?
Rare it is that we have something tangible to latch onto, something that isn’t swept away in the relentless onward rush and ceaseless noise and panic of life. It is remarkable what a difference it makes psychologically. It’s like the few times you see the efforts of parenting bearing fruit. My father once pointed out that although his then four-year-old grandson couldn’t read ahead as he was labouring through the words of his picture book, he had the cadences right for the growing sentence, because I had read aloud to him so much. I hug that to me still during the countless times I wonder if I’m raising him right, or indeed at all.
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It gives you the strength to go on. That sounds melodramatic, but it’s true. We need markers, we need something solid to point to occasionally and say: “I did that. It was a good thing and I did it.” Most of us are more familiar with a sense of failure than its opposite.
I never feel like I’ve done enough or succeeded at anything. But my God – it feels great! I want to feel it again! For the first time I understand that the platitude “success breeds success” might contain some truth. What else might be true in the coming year? Should I live, laugh, love too? Look up exactly what “mindful” means and become it?
No, no – obviously not. But there is something, I think, to be gained by focusing on and maybe even periodically burnishing a little the knowledge that you set out to do something and you did it, instead of diminishing it – as so many of us habitually do – or letting it be torn from us by the rushing stream of nonsense that is life and smashed to useless bits on the rocks below.
There is something to be gained by observing, perhaps, the impulse that says “Oh, well, if I did it it can’t have been that hard/worthwhile/important after all”. What recipe for happiness is that, when you think about it? Where did we learn it? Whose idea was it to have us sawing ourselves off at the knees all the goddamn time?
Which leads me, for 2026, to the most valuable resolution of all: to notice stupid, unhelpful patterns and habits of thought that have become so deeply embedded in us all as to appear both natural and immutable and knock them on the everlovin’ head.
That and another couple of recipes should do nicely.
Also, start a Substack. Happy New Year.
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