Hilary Fannin: How I learned to start worrying and love the angst

I suppose it’s a seasonal thing: this need for reappraisal, this new-broom feeling that pops up with the lost turkey thermometer (a bit late now, mate) when you open the kitchen drawer to shove the electricity bill out of sight.

My resolutions this year are exactly the same as my resolutions last year: work more, drink less and don’t forget to worm the cat.

I feel like a goldfish with a three-second memory function; a fiftysomething, wrinkled goldfish, that is, with a persistent spare tyre and a mouthful of overpriced root-canal work, but a goldfish nonetheless.

There’s something decidedly goldfishy about facing four-square into another year, resolving to pull up your baggy socks and rein in billowing distractions, and then, in the time it takes to circuit your bowl, failing and forgetting, only to remember and resolve, again and again. Reigniting oneself each new year with the same spent match.

Mind you, the myth that goldfish have a three-second memory has been blown clean out of the scientific water, apparently. According to some rabidly dull article I found in the dentist’s waiting room, goldfish can – wait for it – outshine trout in cognitive functioning.

Trout? You must be codding me. Those perspicacious freshwater fellows?

You could have knocked me down with a sterilised toothpick.

A five-month sentence

Apparently goldfish can actually remember things for about five months. That Christmas compromise gift (no, you cannot have a puppy) swimming around in its tiny glass dome on top of the children’s bedside locker and slowly turning an alarming shade of mud green is not actually thrown into a lather of wonder every time it swims past that ornamental aquarium castle you bought it on Ebay. Its little guppy mouth is not opening for another sprinkling of shrimp pellets. It’s trying to tell you that it’s bored out of its underestimated brain and is having an aqua-stential crisis that’s going to last until May, when its five months are up and it can forget again.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yep, failed and failing resolutions. Aside from “work more, drink less” (which is probably a slight improvement on “work less, drink more”, which I had been contemplating), I have had one original impulse this January, one notion I might manage to remain faithful to. I thought, in 2015, that I might try to embrace anxiety.

Don't ask me for the statistics (look, I have significant problems counting beyond 10) but they say – whoever they are – that about one in six of us is prone to anxiety.

Personally I think you'd want to be truly off your rocker not to be feeling anxious in this shaky age of global warming, feral social media, unflattering leisurewear and decorative contact lenses.

So it’s consoling to predict that anxiety will be the new cool.

Anxiety sells

There is a current television advertising campaign for a very expensive perfume, a brand synonymous with opulence and luxury, which makes neurosis and mild depression look aspirational, a wannabe lifestyle choice.

You know the one I mean: the ad artily slows down You're the One That I Want, from Grease and features an awfully worried-looking, albeit beautiful, woman wading out of a frothy ocean in bone-dry surfing gear, her golden locks barely dampened, in search of her lover, only to find a handwritten note from him, saying "To my heart I must be true".

The lover, an anxious chap, with his knitted brow and five o’clock shadow, is so busy negotiating his existential despair, his fancy car and his Malibu-style beach house that he can’t manage to do up his dicky bow properly.

The fretful pair eventually reunite in a gothic concert-hall box, but only after a lot of foreboding looks and troubled perfume-spraying.

I like the ad (as in “Oh God, look at this awful ad”). It’s a festival of mild depression and good tailoring, which seems to imply that it’s no longer enough to be rich and thin, we now also need to be steeped in an alluring personal crisis.

So that’s it: rather than trying to banish negatives and stamp out the pins and needles of paranoia by running around the park, eating a balanced diet and avoiding caffeine, bank managers, parent-teacher meetings, gin, deadlines and effortlessly elegant people, I’m simply going to embrace my angst.

Ask any alarmingly intelligent goldfish: anxiety is a cultural condition, a function of the times we live in. Learn to love it.