Be it resolved

Oddly enough, back in the day, a friend of mine took me to her Manhattan gym a couple of times. It was equipped with everything – squash courts, a swimming pool, fully equipped gym (obviously) and a tanning booth. But, after you’d done your work out (whatever that was), it also had not just a juice bar, but also a wine bar where you could swill wine and chain smoke and quickly undo whatever good you’d managed to do elsewhere in the building. My kind of gym.

Resolutions are foolish things. Like rules, there made to be broken. Unlike rules, there is no pleasure to be had in breaking resolutions. Only guilt and shame. So, no resolutions for me.

There is nothing wrong, however, with having some aspirations.

I’ve just set fire to 2021 – a year that flew by, unlike its predecessor.

So, onwards and hopefully upwards into 2022 with the first beautiful image on my new calendar.

One thing I’m aspiring to do this month (if not the whole year) is avoid losing hours to Freecell. I managed this yesterday. I did open the site, but quickly closed it again. Good for me. Of course, I also compensated by doing half a dozen Guardian crossword puzzles and innumerable New Yorker jigsaws. (Well, it does take time to complete a Level 1 jigsaw in under three minutes.) Not exactly the sort of “get shit done” day abandoning Freecell could provide, but it’s an aspiration.

I now have three alarms beside my bed: one I can’t quite figure out how to set properly, another I often forget to switch on because I think I’ve set the first one properly, and the one on my phone which isn’t enough to wake me up unless I’ve had eight hours of sleep. Given my predilection for “just one more episode” of shows on Netflix and BritBox until “oh, there’s only one episode left”, I didn’t actually get out of bed until nearly 1pm yesterday. This morning one of the alarms did actually wake me up, but I switched it off and fell back asleep until nearly noon. Well, that’s an improvement, isn’t it? Perhaps tomorrow it will be 11am and by the next morning I’ll be back to 10am, my optimal time. Perhaps I’ll even get to 9am. It’s an aspiration.

In any case, I’m going to try to get myself off the sofa by midnight and into bed for a couple of hours of reading. Lights out at 2am for eight hours of sleep. It’s an aspiration.

I said at the beginning of November that I was going to try to write something every day that month. I managed a week, then it went pear shaped. Well, I’m going to try again this month. I’m already on a good run – last five days of December and first two of January. A solid week. Let’s see how it goes. It’s an aspiration.

As for exercise and housework, well, let’s get to them later. As my neighbour Pat was fond of saying, you can’t rush these big jobs.

Wish me luck.