“And so the native hue of Resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought...

I don’t think I’ve ever kept a New Year’s Resolution in my life. In 1995 (I think) I knocked off the booze until January 19th, and in my childhood, having fallen into the habit of using a mildly racist insult I had picked up from schoolmates, I resolved to eschew the word, only for it to slip out in a moment of vexation on 27th December.

Of course we know it’s pointless, but the effort has to be made. Without the occasional well-prepared thrust of abnormal will-power, no alterations to one’s course along the primrose path which leads to the everlasting bonfire will ever be made, and enterprises of great pith and moment in this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action, which is certainly what happens to all of mine. One needs a peg to hang these things on, otherwise they won't happen, and the New Year fills the bill. Otherwise, life turns into a slow and drawn-out suicide, in the sense that one is likely to have as little to show for the next twenty years as if one were to top oneself tonight.

So here goes once more for Cipriano’s 2008 rezzos. Not normally given to either self-hatred or schizophrenia, but I will wage a bitter and ruthless war of extermination against roughly one-sixth of myself. I will more than decimate myself. I will wipe the useless and parasitic minority of human cells colonising my waistline off the face of the earth. The pathetic remnants which survive will be strictly confined within the bonds of a 38 inch trouser waist, with a 36 held in reserve as a terrible warning.

And the second is linked to it; I will take action to raise the siege of my poor beleaguered liver. It will get an extended cease-fire from the massed artillery of alcohol, to allow for regeneration. Besides, that’s the only way I can think of to achieve objective 1. I’ve tried everything else, even exercise.

Then there is the usual list of books to write, money to be made, one divorce to digest, another to avoid, just like last year and most of the last forty; nothing new, though one or two things are coming into sharper focus.

For instance, I will spend this year doing more of the things I enjoy doing, and less of the ones I don't. Sounds sorta obvious, until one looks at it. We spend far too much time doing unenjoyable things because we've accepted that we've got to without properly examining the evidence for this belief, or because we can't get our arse in gear to make the necessary plans to do enjoyable stuff instead. No more of that. No doubt 2008 will have its share of unpleasant duties, but each duty will have to declare itself and prove its case against a shit-hot advocatus diaboli before it is accepted as such. And fun will become the default setting. Believe me, that will be more difficult than laying off the booze. Or tell me I'm a liar.