New Year's Resolutions are never kept - don't make any

So says gardener Andrew Oldham and he tells us why he holds this unconventional view – see if you agree

- 

As the bells strike twelve and the bongs dwindle, and the last refrain of Auld Lang Syne drifts away with the party poppers, the seasonal game of resolutions begins. We like to think of ourselves as rational, educated and forward-thinking people but the resolution is much older than you think. Picture a house some 4,000 years ago, the fire is dwindling to ash, the songs and stories have stopped, someone has hit the musician for not playing their favourite song and out back you can hear a relative being violently ill and blaming something they ate, and that it has nothing to do with the wine they have consumed by the bucket load. Yes, you're in a Babylonian household, and their worries are your worries because it is the festival of Akitu and everything they have borrowed they now have twelve days to give back. It is a veritable rendition of musical chairs as neighbours dash across alleyways, and rooftops to pay back loans, to give back objects borrowed and food they have had from their friends and family in their community. It was the Romans who changed it, and the adage of, 'What have the Romans ever done for us?' can be seen in how they took the festival Akitu and ladled in gallons of guilt. The fear of the debt collector became the fear of breaking promises to the god Janus, and the priesthood around the temples listened greedily to these confessions. People who feared that past problems would taint their futures, promised they would give up their bad habits in the future and the priests listened, and the wealthy ones were quickly absolved for their sins, through the movement of coins. This kind of sums up our relationship with New Year's resolutions today, a fear that we won't do them, then be called out on them or worst still be blackmailed about it, in those old immortal words that many a Roman knew, 'Well, that didn't last long.' We then throw money at it to go away, in the beli