Pffffft…… Heavy sigh. General air of lethargy and gloom.
A week into the new year I’m depressing myself reading magazine features urging me to ‘review, retrench and resolve’ and persuade me that walking, running, swimming, joining a gym or zumba class, de-cluttering my house and my wardrobe, adopting a regime of ‘clean eating’, body-brushing, yoga or meditation will transform my physique and unscramble my mind.
There’s even one guy advocating the spiritual benefits of getting up an hour earlier to “clean the house mindfully”. It’s doing my head in just reading about it. This is no time of year for self-denial and self-improvement. This is the season of sloth and high-calorie hot stodge, sleeping in and sofa-slumping with a stack of novels, a pile of box sets – and chocolate. Even the weather invests one with a profound disinclination to venture out except in the exceptional circumstances – like when those grey suede boots I’ve had my eye on are so heavily reduced in a sale, their price is now merely exorbitant.
Counsels of perfection are offered for every eventuality. There’s across-the-board appeal from mental health gurus for people to spend less time on social media. Since I tweet not, neither do I Skype, nor conduct my conversations by text, I can afford to be virtuously judgmental.
I’d be grateful if people could detach themselves from their iPhones at least while at the restaurant table. I don’t want to see your pet doing cute things, nor the luxurious interior of your last holiday hotel room as an accompaniment to three delicious courses.
I don’t understand this compulsion to record every mundanity, or go sightseeing or to a concert and view everything through a lens. We used to mock foreign tourists for that. However, if you’d order those grey suede boots online for me, I’d be much obliged, since they haven’t got them here in my size. (That’s ‘retrenchment’ postponed for a while.)
As for ‘review’, I slide open my wardrobe doors (there’s so much in there they don’t actually close,) wondering what I can cull. I’m going to be ruthless. Three categories – ‘KEEP’, ‘MAYBE’ and ‘LET GO’. This rapidly becomes a multiple pile-up under the headings ‘what possessed me?’, ‘don’t remember buying this’ and ‘sentimental value’. Every surface covered. It’ll be the spare room bed for me. But tonight I’m going to Nollaig na mBan, celebrated with the same seven wonderful women for the last 23 years and I’m wearing the dress I wore to the first one. See? Keep a thing long enough…
On New Year’s Day, roughly 66 per cent of people resolved to reduce their weight in the coming weeks. By today, two-thirds of them will have already backslid by hoovering up Christmas leftovers on the principle that ‘wilful waste makes woeful want’ and there’s that great chunk of Christmas cake left and half a box of continental truffles hidden in the sideboard.
The national dailies have published glossy diet supplements which I have religiously studied. Some are obsessed with pulverizing everything into a nutritious but revolting-looking gloop, thus depriving the tastebuds of one of food’s basic pleasures – chewing. One recipe I tried had nine ingredients, (minuscule quantities of each,) not a hint of salt and such a chopping, shredding, grating faff to prepare. I followed instructions to the letter and ended up with half-cooked vegetables floating in watery stock that a workhouse matron would’ve poured down the sink.
Other pundits emphasise, not the substance of the meal, but the portion size and recommend a small plate or a cereal bowl. Tried that too – and had to go back for seconds.
Most dietary regimes offer ‘snacks’. My idea of a snack isn’t two cubes of Cheddar and a crispbread. No wonder by the third evening people put their coats on over their nightwear and drive to the garage shop for a Mars bar. Ah well, that’s ‘resolve’ shot to shreds.
But I take New Year comfort in the memory of how the Loving Spouse used to put his arms around my considerable bulk and say, “Like Mary Poppins, you’re practically perfect in every way.”
