For some years now we have had this terrific idea of only spending New Year's Eve with a small group of people who love the whole notion of celebrating it and shouting and making public resolutions.
I am in charge of writing down these resolutions and then, as an extra refinement, laminating them and sending them to the group of eight people who made them. From that day they are never mentioned again but on the following New Year's Eve the lamination is produced and we all read with horror our list of pious hopes, most of which have not been achieved.
One problem in the past has been that a lot of the resolutions are not specific enough. If someone has said "Go swimming" then how do we really know whether this was kept or not? Is one swim enough or was more implied? If you say "Cut down on the drink", or "Read a lot more", then these things are hard to quantify. Whatever you drank could be described as having cut down on what you could have drunk had you put your mind to it and reading anything could be called reading more.
So now the question is whether things should be rigidly defined or not. This year there was a rather heated debate about the matter. The lobby against over-specifying says that if it were to be a question of 50 push-ups a morning, reading 75 novels a year and having 15 lessons at improvers' bridge, then they just couldn't face the year at all and nothing whatsoever would be done.
The group that thinks you have to define it or else nothing gets done anyway realises that the dreams must be less ambitious and that there should be a section called LITPO. This means Look Into the Possibility Of . . . It's actually a great way of letting ourselves off the hook. If you Look Into The Possibility Of giving up smoking as your nice general resolution and then next year you were still puffing away you could say with a clear conscience that you did Look Into The Possibility and rejected it.
Some of us thought that this was too wishy-washy, so it was sort of agreed that every LITPO resolution had to be accompanied by a smaller and less ambitious but very specific one. This took ages and ages and an enormous amount of eating and drinking to work out to everyone's satisfaction. The tone of the conversation was raised to unbearable levels and the peacemaker among us, trying to restore some harmony and agreement to it all, asked if there were any areas where we all shared some resolution, not just a vague, umbrella promise to be better people. There must be something we all wanted to do, he said hopefully.
And amazingly there was. All right so maybe it reveals slightly more about ourselves than should be known, like the man who 30 years ago was the first of us to go to a sauna and he described it excitedly as a hot place where you sit and black rivulets of sweat course down your body. Anyway, it turns out that out of eight people, seven are not good at setting the video. And the reason? There's someone else in the house to do it for you. Or if there isn't we buy five-hour video tapes and start recording hours before it's needed and this involves hours of spooling through.
Could we make a Specific Resolution not a LITPO to learn to do it? It's such a simple thing; it could only take two hours. All you have to do is to see which channel on the telly corresponds to the channel on the video and read the instructions. And then there's Video Plus. Is that easier or worse? So we wondered if there would be a course that would teach us how to do it. Not a series of lessons but one, say a morning, three-hour one which would include a break for one glass of wine and one scone. And we would all turn up with our note-books, our instruction manuals and our remote controls while somebody, possibly aged 14, would explain it. General principles would be explained from 9.30 a.m. to 11 a.m., then the glass of wine and the scone and a lot of general bonding conversation and then, at 11.20 a.m. sharp, we would return for a summary of what had been said and an intensive question-and-answer session. We would all love to attend a course like that some Saturday morning, if we could find one. Love it to bits.
There was some heated debate about whether it would be women only. Was this regressive? I remember going to the Electrical Association for Women in London to learn how to change plugs and fuses and that was perfectly fine because none of us felt like ejits or had to prove ourselves in front of technically over-competent and possibly scornful, male attitudes.
But the world has moved on since then and no one says anymore that women are hopeless with gadgets and men can't boil an egg. Everyone we mentioned it to thinks it's a great idea; nobody thinks its pathetic or patronising.
Everyone has met someone who says: "I'd love to have recorded that but the children were out so we couldn't do it." And though you want to smack them and tell them to read the damn book, we all know in our hearts that the older you get the more complicated the book becomes and you ache for someone who will give it to you in a few simple steps without a million options which make us lose the main clause.
The numbers of recruits are swelling every day. So now we have an ever-increasing group of geriatric, poorly co-ordinated, couch potatoes searching for this course.
I'd set one up myself, restricting the numbers to 20 and charging £5 a head, if I had a venue that wasn't full of draughts and a bright, young person with communication skills, a pleasant personality and endless patience.
I really would do it you know. But one of my LITPO resolutions was connected to not taking on any more mad, hare-brained notions and actually doing what I was being paid to do, which was to write. So I will have to leave it to someone else and just throw out this brilliant idea to anyone who may be interested. I am convinced there's a steady living out there for someone who is prepared to do this and, if anyone does set one up, I'll go to it. If it's any good then I'll give them free publicity.
There will need to be a very clear brief and easy to understand list of instructions included in the price - and it might be tactful to have it in fairly large print too. The scone and the glass of wine are not essential but I think a lot of things stand or fall by having a wonderful imaginative idea like that as a marketing tool.
If you want to write to me, just put Dalkey, Co Dublin on the envelope. I've been around here a long time; that will find me. I'm dying to know when the course will be and will be eagerly waiting details of it all.