I mostly don’t bother with New Year resolutions. I normally just say more of the same and leave it at that. If you are not regulating your life on the go throughout the year, there isn’t much chance it will suddenly happen on January 1. This year, however, I have decided to give them a little go, these resolutions. I am giving up bread for January, just to see if it can cure my sluggisness. Sudden changes are rarely good. You find yourself compensating in ways which are equally harmful. You give up chocolate and you replace it with crisps. You give up smoking and you replace it with cream cakes. In a rare alignment of the universe with human ambitions, on January 1 I paid my television license: t,he same day the television stopped working. This could be a useful imposition of tellyless evenings. Yes but the risk now is that I will be on the internet longer. There is nothing for nothing. It is human vanity to think we manage these transitions without other harms or without canny manipulative compromise. We shall see for the bread. It has only been two days.

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