Resolutions

I quite like the idea of New Year's Resolutions: new year, new start, taking stock, all that kind of thing. This year I think the important thing is not to resolve the same old, same old. I don't know for how many years I have been resolving to eat less, drink less, exercise more, so clearly I never do it or I wouldn't have to resolve it all over again. I suppose there is the possibility that if I never made the resolutions in the first place I would become huge, slow and utterly drunk, sliding inexorably into decadence like Julie Burchill at her worst. But I think not.

So this is the year for some others. I have just been sorting magazines into piles so here is number one:
I will stop buying new magazines and start rereading the ones I have got. Anything I am not prepared to reread must go to recycling. I'm always keeping them, especially gardening magazines. They accumulate in piles in various corners of the house. So read them or chuck them and don't invite any more inside (other than the ones on subsription, sorry, didn't tell you about those. Is that cheating?)

And here is another gardening one:
I will really try to do the successional sowing of vegetables that I am always reading about, thinking about and intending to do but somehow never quite managing. Let us start small. I won't be able to do it for loads of different things so just two: peas and rocket for sweet full peapods and tiny young leaves of rocket.

And a cooking one.
I have a huge selection of cookery books. Instead of just reading them or taking them out of the shelves and putting them back I will cook one new dish every week. I have a really lovely book by Tessa Kiros and that is the place to start with food from Scandinavia and the Lebanon, the main thing the recipes have in common (other than her heritage) being strong and singing flavours.

And a Welsh one: more listening, more speaking, more practice.

And I think I will finish with an impossible one: I might try to combine my passionate attachment to gardening and food and living in fleece with becoming incredibly glamourous, not every day, perhaps on Thursdays.

There we go. I'll report back on early progress at the end of the month.