Some worthwhile things to do this New Year

Now that the Christmas season is behind us, it is time to settle the tab. For some that will be paying the much-inflated credit card bill later this month. For some it will mean forswearing treats. For still others it will be the cold reality of putting into effect all those New Year resolutions, so lightly made when the season of goodwill was all around us.

Now it is time to fulfil them all. Or at least try and achieve some of them. What is on your list of resolutions, of improvement?

It might be that you intend to eat better, or certainly less. Less cake. Less processed food. More organic. More fish, less meat. More vegetables, less butter. This may also be bound up in your wish – though maybe not desire – to reach less often for a glass of something after 5 o’clock, or to have just two pints on your evening out, rather than the five (you tell people you had).

Those aspirations all sound marvellous on the 1st January. The best of food intentions are too often thwarted by the reality of modern food, packaged and processed. Get your food in any other way, and the other p – price – will (literally) arise. Trying to eat well and cheaply requires time and expertise that too many of us simply don’t have.

So, what’s the way to address that? Slowly, perhaps. Would switching some of your grocery buying to a fresh basket of vegetables from a market each week not be a great start? If you eat a carrot from the market, after scraping the fresh dirt off it, you know what I mean. If you want to take it slower, perhaps use some fresh veg to make one large batch of soup each weekend, and enjoy it over a few days during the week. Throw in a few portions of oily fish for a few dinners, and you will be on the right road. Your doctor will confirm when you take your annual check.

You may have sent a load of WhatsApp messages on New Year’s Eve, earnestly promising to spend less time looking at your phone. Now comes the hard part: to break out of the doomscrolling. We all know how it works. You sit down for two minutes, and one hour later there you are, still scrolling, following the sensory skittles that makes up the technology that is a smartphone. Meanwhile, any number of people may have tried to engage you in conversation, only to find that you have returned to the days of teenage grunting, barely hearing, barely responding.

They are a marvel, the phones. Sold to us as freedom, and they lock us in chains. And the social media? We west of Ireland people have a great expression for what social media does to you: it mithers you. And yet back and back we go, like an old boxer, with sore limbs, climbing back into the ring. We can tell ourselves one hundred times that social media is an addictive trick, designed to make money for really rich people through advertising rubbish to us that we don’t need. We can all see those lovely teenagers, completely zonked and zoned out by them – and worse. We all know this. We all talked about it over Christmas, and yet, and yet, back we go.

So while we all know that we can’t – or won’t – throw our phones into the bin, or delete all the apps, could we try and manage the use of the damn things a little better in 2025? Can we insist that the dinner table is sacrosanct? Can we try and watch a movie on a Friday night without looking at any other screen? Can we leave the phone in another room while we read a newspaper or book? When we go visiting, can we remember to leave the ringing volume on and then not look at it again throughout our visit? If it’s important, they will ring and you will hear it.

And as regards what we do with our saved time, is this the year we finally get to visit those places we have been talking about for long enough? Those places might be within our county or island, or further afield. Is this the time to finally make that habit of taking a drive on a Sunday to the lovely scenic spots of Mayo? Or having a trip away every couple of months, in a county you have not yet visited? Or is it the year to plan that trip to the destination of a lifetime? Time and budget will determine the scope of all that, but inertia should not prevent a start. 

‘I think I’m quite ready for another adventure’, said Bilbo Baggins, at the start of the Lord of the Rings. And he was, may I remind you, 111 years old when he said that. So there are no excuses.

It might also be the time to make that exercise routine more than a mental one. If I lived in Mayo, I would have a bike and would spend hours on the back roads on it. Not in that ‘ultra cycling’ kind of way, but in finding all sorts of different ways to get from one town to another. Now that would be a fine adventure, a damn good way to get fit, and an excellent way to justify some of the things I would not give up eating. My resolution for the year will include climbing even more mountains around the county, which in fairness is more of a confirmation than a resolution.

One further and final thing to consider. Our tradition of visiting each other in our homes is one of the finest aspects of life in the west of Ireland. Dublin doesn’t really have anything like it. In Dublin, family (sometimes) visit. Friends meet outside the home. Neighbours – if you’re lucky – say hello.

There is a tendency for the tradition of visiting neighbours and friends and more distant relations to diminish as rural life becomes more urban. That would be a real pity. My childhood was made much richer – and my tooth made much sweeter – by the procession of people coming to visit. Unannounced, friends and relations would call to the door. Tea would be made, sandwiches produced, cake and buns and what have you presented. There might even be a glass of something stronger. News would be exchanged, craic would be had, ties would be further bound. You could be in the middle of such a visit when a neighbour would arrive and be seamlessly integrated into the flow of the conversation. It was the glue that held a community together. In this world where so many troubles and distractions are dividing people, it would be a good resolution to get back to more of that. And leave the phones at the door.