Happy New Year!

I just can’t help myself. Despite writing a feature for the Galway Now Magazine on why NOT to make New Year’s resolutions, I still find myself lying in bed with the laptop thinking about how I’m going to up my visits to the gym starting tomorrow, drink less, save money and all the usual resolutions that are only ever good for making you feel guilty in the end. My big one is the get fit lark and given that it was last years resolution too, and the year before and they year before that, I should have learnt by now that it probably won’t work. If I were to look back at what I consistently achieve year upon year I should really resolve to put on half a stone, not finish my novel and be sure to have dipped well into my overdraft by the end of the year with a drawer full of unpaid invoices to boot. And come to think of it, if next year ends like that too, it might not be a bad place to be. In fact, the more I think about it the more attractive it becomes. You see, all of those predicaments are just normal run of the mill things so it means that actually everything is going just grand, and I'm not trying to manage a crisis nor am I having trouble coping with every day life.

Besides, you can’t ‘resolve’ to make your highlights happen either, and there have been a few of those this year. I definitely didn’t make a New Years resolution to have Gerry Adams come up to me and buy my book; to sit in my living room with the fire blazing and feel that the whole world is OK because I can hear my son play guitar in the next room; to make a commitment to my beloved; to find a day job that I actually like; to see the screaming red sunset over Galway Bay without having to be on holiday.  I could go bore people with more, but my point is this: instead of beating yourself up making resolutions to be a better person why not think about all of the things this year that made it special. You’ll notice that most of them weren’t planned, or the result of resolutions, which means that next year you are bound to have similar joys thrown at you.

Of course you can choose to pick out all the bad things that happened and tell yourself that more bad stuff will come along. But the good thing is that the New Year means you are leaving all of that behind. And that also means that if anything unpleasant does happen this year that you can remind yourself that you always get over it anyway and it will, indeed pass.

So given all this optimism I still can’t figure out why I can’t stand the 10, 9, 8 lark at midnight and the Auld Langs Isle carry on. I like to hide around five minutes before midnight, normally in a toilet, and reappear once the formalities have been dealt with. But for those of you who are not adverse to the celebration of same, Happy New Year!