HAPPY New Year everyone. Have you broken any of your resolutions yet?

I’m writing this on December 31, so I’m still in the blissful ignorance of belief that I will truly manage to keep up the changes I vow to make this year.

This is despite the fact that New Year indulgence will no doubt leave me a hopeless wreck on January 1, lying in bed until 2pm, eating greasy bacon butties for breakfast and not doing any exercise (unless you count lifting the remote control and moaning about my headache) – thereby breaking three resolutions in one fell swoop.

The trouble with New Year’s resolutions is that we’re always so hard on ourselves. You don’t see anybody vowing to have more fun or laugh more, do you?

It’s all: “I’m not drinking alcohol until Easter,” or “I won’t let another chocolate pass my lips until I’m a size zero.”

The harsh strictness we impose on ourselves, added to the fact that it’s cold, it’s wet, it goes dark at 4pm and we’re all poor after Christmas, makes keeping even the best-laid plans all the more difficult.

It doesn’t help that the papers love shoving depressing statistics down our throats, either. Apparently fewer than one in 10 people kept a New Year’s resolution for the whole of 2009, so the Daily Telegraph smugly informed us. The unspoken undertone of the article being ‘You might as well give up now. What’s the point in trying?’ So what? I say. Who cares if the odds are heavily stacked against us? Who cares if we’ll almost certainly fail in our bid to emerge into a perfect version of ourselves in 2010? Surely the most important point of all is that we care enough to at least try to improve ourselves.

Another recent study, however, was more positive. It found that people were tending to make more meaningful resolutions this year because we’re at the start of a new decade. So rather than just losing weight, drinking more water and cutting down on chocolate, many of us are deciding to change careers, spend more time with family and emigrate.

The start of a new decade does make you think, though, doesn’t it?

I can’t believe it’s been 10 years since the millennium.

It only seems five minutes ago that we were all worrying about the Y2K bug, a proliferation of bars called ‘Millennium’ popped up in provincial towns and that we all learned that millennium was spelt with two ‘n’s.

Top of the agenda for 2010 is getting physically and financially fitter.

Other popular resolutions for this year are to stop smoking, lose weight, quit drinking, get organised, learn something new, and help others.

Whatever your resolution – whether it’s to learn Japanese or just to enjoy life more, I wish you all the best.

And don’t beat yourself up if you slip up a bit on your quest to perfection.

After all, the world would be a boring place if we all got everything right the first time of trying, wouldn’t it?