Meals can’t have a cork: My ambitious New Year’s resolutions

Stop aiming so high - just make your New Year’s Resolutions small, very specific and able to be kept all year, Mel Buttle argues.

I only made one this year – New Year’s resolution, that is. It’s a biggie so I will only need this one.

In years gone by I’ve had a laundry list of things to improve about myself.

I’d write all the classics out and put them on the fridge: weight loss, drinking less, exercising more and eating better. Perhaps the best place for that list wasn’t on the appliance that housed Tim Tams, Twiggy Sticks and prosecco. Apparently we won’t be allowed to call it prosecco much longer, so I’m ahead of the curve; I already refer to it as prosecky.

Of course these overwhelming, non-specific resolutions all fall apart before Valentine’s Day anyway, when I decide that chips and gravy are more than a sometimes food and are one of my top tools to cope with a bad day. I realise that’s a lofty ambition for a box of chips draped in bain marie gravy, isn’t it?

A sometimes food or a coping mechanism?

I think the key would be to be specific. Resolutions like, “I will exercise three times a week” would surely be more successful than, “not flinch when I open the front-facing camera on my phone”. Or “prosecky only on weekends” would’ve maybe had a chance of working, instead of: “meals can’t have a cork”.

I think the new year is an easy time to make a resolution; the nation is still asleep, we’re not really back at work, and best of all it’s hot. It’s easy to eat salads for dinner when it’s hot.

I see the world through rose-coloured glasses in January, as I tuck myself into bed on December 31, I always have that same thought, “will this be my year?”

What an optimist. I don’t think I’ve had “my year” yet, as not once has a member of a cabin crew asked if I wanted to make an announcement, and you’ll note, I’m still working, this column hasn’t been written by my assistant while I sail the Croatian coast blasting true crime podcasts and eating carbonara.

I think the ideal time to make a resolution would be in the dead of winter. I’d mean it by then. It’d be shaped by experience and well informed, not like these flimsy summertime resolutions.

Mel Buttle.

The current crop of new year’s resolutions reminds me of when we’d stay awake talking at a high school sleepover, where you’d prattle off to the other girls what you thought you’d be when you were grown up. I’d say things like, “I want to be a speech pathologist, but also an actor, and maybe do forensics at crime scenes as well”.

The one big resolution I did make for this year came to me when I was bailed up by a passer-by on the street.

Does this stuff only happen to me?

Out of a whole street of people I was the lucky person who got to hear the same story about car parts from a complete stranger, twice through.

I was in a hurry to get somewhere, but I was still polite and gave it two good listens.

It was when he began shaping up to retell it with some more info that I did my version of being assertive. I said, “well I have to go now, I’ve got an appointment”.

That is huge for me. The old Mel would’ve let that story be told thrice, then just keep saying “well, all right then, OK then, anyway, it’s hot out here isn’t it?” until the chatterbox left the scene.

No more, not this year.

I’m done with hearing car part stories in 38C heat.

I guess my New Year’s resolution is to say, “I have some chips and gravy that are going cold, I must be off”.

Originally published as Meals can’t have a cork: My ambitious New Year’s resolutions