I promised I wouldn’t do a piece on resolutions in January, because let’s face it, nobody needs to be made to feel worse by some smug git’s new health kick in this, the bleakest of months.

For me Christmas is all about family. But when family sprawls across multiple generations and at least four different households — who would all ‘love to get everyone together at the same time’ and ‘preferably on Christmas Day’ — my holiday season begins with trying to manage everyone’s expectations…including two small children who will inevitably be happy wherever they end up, as long as they can eat their own weight in chocolate tree decorations.

I’ve said before that I don’t make resolutions, or at least not at new year when I’m still enduring the emotional hangover of saying goodbye to December’s festivities. But I read something recently about autumn resolutions that seemed to make a bit more sense.

When it comes to environmental issues, there are two main camps splashed across the media – the climate-change deniers (complete with gas-guzzling cars, private jets and secret oil investments), and the hemp-wearing activists, disrupting traffic in major cities with their protests.

You finally decide to take a long-awaited family holiday, you pick a date, tentatively negotiate the time off work and choose a location that seems to tick all the boxes.

When it comes to keeping the house clean I’ve tried many methods. I’ve bored my friends and family with my efforts to declutter using Marie Kondo’s ‘Spark Joy’ process including learning how to fold my pants correctly (who knew there was a wrong way to fold your pants?

If you were to describe me in just three words ‘moderate’ wouldn’t be one of them. In fact, if you were to describe me in 100 words you’d still be very unlikely to land on moderate.

On our local skate ramp some clever soul has scrawled ‘Don’t grow up it’s a trap’…(they’ve also written something about being ‘the daughters of the witches that wouldn’t burn’ but we’ll ignore that for the purpose of this article).