Resolved

My New Year’s resolutions are a bit late because I haven’t been able to keep the first one…and I did want to have ten but I’m just not that resolute.

I read somewhere that the tradition of New Year's Resolutions was inherited from the ancient Babylonians, who believed that what a person did on the first day of the New Year would affect the entire year. Apparently, the most popular resolution at that time was to return borrowed farm equipment. And here’s me thinking they were a bunch of decadent whores…

With a suitable holier-than-thou expression:





I bring you my Resolutions:

• I will not procrastinate
• I will stop dieting (and before you keel over laughing, I've been dieting all my life so how come I'm now fatter than I've ever been, eh?)
• I will learn to do housework
• I will prepare my lessons more than fifteen minutes in advance (oops, better get cracking)
• I will defrost the freezer
• I will not involve kitchen knives, boiling oil (even if it's olive), nutcrackers and my absent husband in the same fantasy
• I will return that Massey Ferguson combine harvester I've had in the garage for six months

There we go. Sorted.

Ménage

One of the reasons my husband left me was because of my lack of housekeeping skills – that and the fact that I didn’t look like Catherine Zeta-Jones. And he was right. I don’t look like Catherine Zeta-Jones and my house does look like a Picasso painting. Actually, I realized years ago that there is a cosmic conspiracy against me: I don't touch anything yet during the night, paperwork, books, dust, small change, pencils, CDs, make-up, socks, coffee cups etc start to breed and I wake up drowning in a writhing primeval soup of clutter.

I keep all sorts of useless bits of paper like cinema tickets, flyers and grocery receipts but still manage to lose insurance documents, bills and doctors’ prescriptions. To make matters worse, the French government tell you to keep certain documents ‘indefinitely’. This type of statement is guaranteed to plunge me into hoarding overdrive and I now have the equivalent of 3 squared kilometres of Amazonian rainforest stuffed into cardboard boxes under my table, just in case.

I would take a photo of my clutter to show you but…I seem to have mislaid my camera. And if you wanted to look at Catherine Zeta-Jones, that's just tough. Here's a picture of me instead...