The Age Of Invisibility

Unachievable resolutions are out, embracing middle age is in … not that anyone notices.

- Joanne Black

Here we are again, facing the pressure to make New Year resolutions when so much time has passed since I broke the last ones that I no longer recall what they were.

I have considered this year approaching my resolutions differently. Each year, I choose self-improving things, such as cutting out sugar, which never last beyond thinking how wasteful it would be not to eat the last Christmas mince pie in the tin on the morning of January 1. If I was the sort of person who planned ahead, I would eat the last mince pie on New Year’s Eve, but I’m usually eating the third- and second-to-last ones then and so worried that the mince-pie season is drawing to a close that I sometimes make a fresh batch. Whatever form the sugar hit takes, that resolution is always doomed.

Bearing in mind the old maxim that you do not get different results by doing the same things, I thought that this New Year I should drop self-improvement and instead embrace the upside of being middle-aged.