Okay, okay, you’ve made your point. Now relax, take it easy. You will still be here tomorrow but your resolutions may not. On this 12th day of January do, please, review the situation and stop punishing yourself. Masochism is just not your thing. Maybe for the few, but not for you.
It really was unrealistic to make that new year resolution. Again. It didn’t work last year, or the year before, so why did you think it would be any easier in January 2026? Surely you must have learned by now that making any resolutions in those lazy, overgorged, saturated days between Christmas and New Year’s is a recipe for misery and pressured self-esteem. Who needs that?
It’s the “never-again-syndrome”, you know, such as can overcome those of us who may occasionally overindulge and, while in – for example – the throes of violent regurgitation into what comedian Billy Connolly once described as “God’s Telephone”, promise “never again. Never, ever, ever again.”
He described toilet bowls as such because of the times he entered a lavatory to find men embracing same, throwing up, and promising into the water below “Oh, God, oh God”, between, well, “gushes”.
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(Dear younger reader, this was in the days before mobile phones when people talked into hand-held devices that were usually secured to one spot. Primitive? Yes!).
Resolutions at any time should be made in cold sobriety and never in the midst of excess – when most of us do so, before swigging back the next pint and promising, “I’ll do better in January”. Of course. Even the Elf on the Shelf laughed at that one.
So here you are on the 12th day of January, utterly miserable, with nothing to look forward to but 19 more days of January, followed by February, and 16 further days in March. Stop. Now. Be gentle with yourself. Life is tough enough at this time of year without more punishment.
A friend commented recently, after yet another reprehensible diatribe by Donald Trump, that: “The downside of being an atheist is I don’t have the comfort of believing he’ll rot in hell.”
A rational possibility is that he might be condemned to living January, February and the first 16 days of March back to back, for all eternity.
Resolutions, from Latin resolutionem, for “reducing things into a simpler form”.
