Talking about a resolution

We make them, we break them, yet, as Felicity Day reveals, our famous forebears –from Pepys to Woolf–were equally as bad at keeping New Year’s resolutions

- Felicity Day

FEW things about the festive season divide opinion like New Year’s resolutions. Love them or hate them, as the clock strikes midnight on December 31, the Champagne glasses clink and Auld Lang Syne echoes all around, some 14 million of us will make one, committing ourselves to punishing exercise regimes and restrictive diets, curbing habits, taking up new hobbies and travelling more.

In doing so, we’re keeping up a tradition thousands of years old. Our modern-day resolutions are thought to have their origins in Babylon and ancient Rome, where it was the custom to make promises to the gods in exchange for favour in the year ahead. For early Christians, the New Year became a time to look back at their conduct during the past 12 months and resolve to do better in the next, from which practice the secular ritual we embrace today evolved.

However, it’s not only the custom that’s as old as Father Time. So are the very resolutions we trot out year after year. Delve into a diary scribbled by one of our forebears, flick to the first day of January and chances are you’ll find a promise pretty similar to the ones we’ll be rashly making as we wave goodbye to 2021.

Take Samuel Pepys. In time-honoured ‘twix tmas’ tradition, December 30, 1662, finds him gaily indulging in ‘five or six glasses of wine, which liberty I now take till I begin my oath again’—an oath to abstain from ‘wine, plays, and other expenses’ that he regularly renewed, not only on New Year’s Eve, but on other high days and holidays, too.