It’s that time of year when you think about New Year’s resolutions.

It’s not unlike Lent, except the resolutions rarely last for 40-days (or nights).

Is this the year I give up chocolate (and make Bournville village a ghost town) and try and get that bikini body ready for the summer of 2024? 

Should I start adding semolina to my diet (having lived without it since an unfortunate episode during a lunch in my Balham primary school in the early ‘60s; this is unlikely – plus, I promised my then probation officer the incident would never happen again).

I’ve wondered about writing a diary?  The last time I wrote one was in the summer of ’76 and wrote the word “hot” for so many weeks I became bored.  I assume it was never continually hot for Samuel Pepys?

Last year, in the UK, the most popular New Year’s resolution was to exercise more. Should I get my Bullworker down from the loft?  Should I ask Charles Atlas for his promised set of muscles – and a duster for the Bullworker?

Or, I could combine several of the above and write in my new 2024 diary: “Have applied to Opportunity Knocks.”  I mean that most insincerely.