Best bet with resolutions is to keep it all much the same

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

One week into the New Year and the only certainty is that the best of the resolutions are already lying on the wasteland, proving only again that the only realistic pledge is to not make promises you cannot keep.

There is no logic to resolutions in the first place; why, for example, would you choose the middle of the busiest social season of the year to give up drink or take up exercise?

Surely you’d have a better chance in February, when you have no other choice after the credit-card bill comes in?

Instead you decide that the morning after a mad night on the lash is the perfect time to turn into Father Mathew, poacher turned gamekeeper in the blink of an eye.

And another thing; if you pack in the drink now, who is going to finish the six cases of Corona you accidentally ordered online instead of the six bottles you had intended to purchase?

Equally, on exercise; why would you think of changing the habits of a lifetime to go running when the sleet and wind are pounding in off the Wild Atlantic?

Surely the time to take up running – if you ever have to – is when the sun is on your back and there’s a cooling wind coming in off the sea . . . not when the weather is working its way through the storm alphabet?

New Year’s resolutions also prove that we learn nothing from experience – the inevitability of failure that means we start the New Year with determination only to see it fall flat by the second week of January.

You announce to one and all in the pub on New Year’s Eve that this is your last night on the pints, and – between the suppressed sniggers – they wish you well, while all the time watching you like a hawk for the first sign of wilting.

They won’t have long to wait, because a week later you’re supping a pint in a quiet corner like a child surreptitiously eating biscuits under the blankets.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.