New Year’s resolutions are a cruel and demoralising prank. Don’t start any personal alterations until April. Spring is the real beginning of the year, as the Romans once knew and the taxman still does. Attempting to remodel yourself as a fountain of self-improvement in the bleak midwinter is just silly.
But in the spirit of the many tip sheets and handy hints lists that pop up everywhere at the beginning of January, here’s mine: 26 for 2026.
- Don’t bother to watch any film or television series made after 2010. It only encourages them. (If the TV series began before 2010, perhaps, but that is the only exception.)
- If and when you lose patience with a young person, make an allowance for their rearing during the stupidest period in world history, surrounded by flashing and blinking distraction boxes that record every stupid thing they’ve ever said or done, and reflect that it was your generation that reared them.
- Do not put any aspect of your real life on the internet. If someone cares enough to look and go ‘aah how sweet’, be assured that there is somebody else who cares enough to try to triangulate your location from the evidence and harass or assassinate you.
- In interactions with bureaucracy always go in affable. The functionary will be so surprised and delighted they will rejoice and melt. If the interlocutor is not responding in kind after three exchanges, you are free to descend to their level.
- Stop obsessing over how much time has passed and doing sums about it. After a certain age, it’s like getting into debt. The figures are meaningless and bankruptcy is inevitable, sooner or later, whatever you do.
- Allow yourself up to 20 minutes, and no more, of despair daily. But don’t tell anybody about it.
- If you see a queue forming at a bar, go right to the front and push in, tapping the rim of a 50 pence piece impatiently on the counter. If challenged, reply ‘This is England’ (or appropriate principality).
- If you feel Christian twinges, read the Bible in an edition that has a good set of annotations. Put C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien to one side until you have – they’re not going anywhere, and it’s cheating.
- Abandon any attempt at keeping abreast of what the young people are doing. Because they aren’t actually doing anything. This is a late 20th century western consideration, and in fact unique to that period. It was bad enough then, and it is squalidly laughable now.
- Don’t try to console yourself with the thought that Labour are nefarious and doing it all on purpose because ‘who could be that stupid’. No. They really are that stupid.
- Saying ‘woke’ is acceptable, and we need a word to describe The Rubbish that continues to besiege us, however low status that word is, and anyway –
- Low status is the new high status.
- The culture war isn’t a war, it is a culture annihilation. It is good to care about it, because culture is important.
- Almost every problem we have is caused by white middle class progressives who are British citizens. They are the people we need to deport.
- Try to remember that the actions of these people are just to goad and annoy all the other kinds of white people, so that progressives can feel superior. Avoid falling into their trap – reserve your anger for them, and focus it on them as if through a burning glass.
- Sentimentality is essential in private. In public, it is unforgivable.
- Having delusions is fine. We all need them to get by. Insisting that other people must share them is impolite at best. Passing laws enforcing them is totally unacceptable. Ignore any such laws.
- Almost everything that demands a special day of civic celebration is awful. When it’s a whole month, this is even worse. Ignore such jamborees.
- It is an option to just forget about sex when you are older. Trying to maintain your physical appeal after a certain age just gives others the sad, tiring sensation of hearing Christmas songs in January.
- If a rebellion isn’t costing you anything then it isn’t a rebellion at all, it’s just a pose, and you should stop it immediately.
- ‘Be yourself’ is the worst possible advice. Our ‘authentic’ selves are terrible. Present the thin sliver of your best qualities to the world and hide all the others as much as you possibly can.
- Find something that interests you – it can be anything at all, useful or useless – and make an exhaustive private study of it, for no other purpose than to satisfy your idle curiosity. Even if you can only spare a minute or two to do this, do it every day. Don’t tell anybody else you’re doing it. It’s your little thing.
- If you have a romantic relationship but you aren’t married, never describe the other person as your ‘partner’. It sounds like you’re going into business with them or participating in the Klondike Gold Rush. Any other term – live-in lover, me oppo, that fool Antonia – is preferable. (With the sole exception of ‘husbear’.)
- Don’t be too quick to congratulate yourself on taking a brave stand. Often, courage and stupidity are very difficult to tell apart.
- Console yourself with the happy thought that this is the final Labour government.
- And that at least some of us will make it through.
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