People I meet for the first time since December 31 or earlier are still wishing me Happy New Year and I am still reciprocating. So it is still a timely moment to share what I wrote for The Connexion, an English-language newspaper for English speakers throughout France, about les bonnes resolutions de nouvel an. One or two regular readers may recognise themselves ...
Nicotine stains on fingers and tobacco odour on clothing tell you all you need to know about people’s ability to keep New Year’s resolutions.
Countless smokers swear they’ll give up on January 1 only to lapse within weeks, days or even hours.
The time of good intentions may be upon us. But the French, like the British and doubtless others to whom the ritual of resolutions is part of the festive tradition, are pretty useless at matching words and actions.
On both sides of the Channel, losing weight and reducing drinking jostle with stopping smoking at the top of any list of pledges to be honoured once January begins.
But there is another resolution I come across a lot, especially in France: “I resolve never to make one again.” It is a reflection of how few feel optimistic about sticking to them.
I am no better. When I smoked, I frequently announced that I was throwing away my cigarettes and would never touch another. But a resolution that has to be repeated is one that has been broken. Giving up came, in the end, by a different route; a nasty chest infection made smoking painful and it was unexpectedly easy to carry on from there.
But there is never a shortage of New Year’s resolutions. One statistic suggests as many as 40 per cent of Americans made them at the start of this century, compared with only a quarter 60 years earlier.
A British psychologist, Richard Wiseman, surveyed more than 3,000 people and found 88 per cent soon broke them. My own unscientific poll of French friends also shows a high failure rate.
In the western world, the most familiar resolutions do not vary greatly between nationalities. But the less common choices reveal a little about how we differ in what, if anything, we promise to do more, less or better.
First there is that determination on the part of some to ignore the custom entirely. “The simplest way to ensure you don’t break good resolutions is not to have any,” a young Parisian mother tells me. “I dislike constraints in my life.”
Mounia, the wife of a French nephew from Le Mans, adds: “I used to resolve to take up sport, quit smoking or get to the cinema or theatre more often but stopped even trying three years ago because I could never see them through.”
Maybe just living in France rubs off. An expat teacher in Grenoble once gave herself a shopping list of seven resolutions, from not dieting - it just seemed to leave her fatter - to avoiding procrastination and returning a borrowed combine harvester after six months. Now, she makes none.
“It is tempting - New Year, new life,” she said. “But the older I get, the more I realise I'm just hopeless at keeping them.“
At a French online women’s forum, I found novel ideas: making firm plans for dinner with female friends at least once a month, tidying up photo libraries and address books, not shouting at the kids about their homework and plonking two euros into a piggy bank daily to save enough for a treat at the end of the year.
And from British as well as French friends come plenty of ecologically correct commitments to pay more attention to recycling, banish plastic bags and be more diligent about turning off lights and taps.
On balance, I’m staying in the No Resolutions camp. Trying to keep any I made – to be less obsessive about football, improve my French or attempt more DIY – would soon drive me to break another useful contender, to cut down on drink.
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