My first new year resolution was that I am going to learn French. Hmmm. Yes. Well. I really intended to learn French, honest. I just don’t seem to have got very far yet. It was all the fault of my MP3 player, which broke. I bought myself a new one, but it doesn’t have the facilty to organise tracks in a sensible order, and so currently I have 198 bits of Michel Thomas organised at random and after every four minutes of listening I have to spend at least another four minutes trying to find the next chronological recording This problem could be solved by me deleting all the stuff off it and just putting a small amount back on. I may try that at lunch, if I can get sufficient privacy.

I did try listening to French this morning, but I encountered the further problem that my MP3 player is stuck on a loop and so it just wanted to play the same chapter over and over again. I now have a very firm grasp of the days of the week, but would hope to progress to another theme shortly, and can’t figure out how Babel, if you’ve got any ideas how to remove that setting, please let me know!

So essentially I have failed in this resolution so far. I did have a burst of activity in April when I was going to Geneva, but have slacked off again since and need to start again at the beginning. I’m a little bit lazy with learning languages. I didn’t exactly learn German or Esperanto, I just kept saying I was going to learn them and one morning woke up speaking them, but methinks that French is going to actually require some input on my part. We’ll see how far I get in the next six months!

My second objective was to lose weight. I have totally, utterly failed at this one. I weighed myself three weeks ago and was horrified to tip the scales at 9 stone I haven’t weighed that much since I was 16. In my defence, I would just like to point out that I have been depressed. The tablets I am taking have weight gain listed as one of their side effects, but probably more to the point,when I’m unhappy I tend to eat a lot of chocolate. There have been some days over the past few months where I’ve eaten as much as three bars of chocolate a day. Certainly, I was doing that when I was in Bolton As of three weeks ago, I have resolved afresh to stop that, so hopefully going forward I will stop expanding!

My third resolution was to save money. My success has been mixed, but this is probably the resolution where I have made the most progress I have transferred £500 to savings every month. Some months I’ve managed to transfer a bit more, some months I’ve had to transfer a bit back again, so on average £500. Sadly, this doesn’t mean I am now rich. There was something during the year which I had to pay out over £3k for, so the net result is that today I am pretty much back at the level of savings I started at when I decided I needed to save more. Hopefully going forward now, my savings should start to increase at a better pace

My last resolution was to learn to drive. I haven’t. I did briefly sit in my boyfriend’s car the other day, but I was a bit overwhelmed by it. The problem with this one is that I don’t actually want to drive, so motivation is somewhat lacking. But I know that I have to, and I will start. Soon. Ish

Not the best track record in the world then; I’ve got another six months to compensate for a slow start

My first resolution is that I am going to learn French.  My boyfriend took me to France in September, and I was terribly embarrassed by the fact that I was unable to communicate with any of his friends except by inane smiling.  I spent five years at school studying French, and came out of the experience with an A* GCSE and a complete inability to speak it.  Well no, that’s a lie; I can say certain things…

Je m’appelle Radio et j’ai douze ans.  Je porte une jupe bleu marine, une chemise blanches, des chaussures noires et des chaussettes noires. Je n’aime pas les uniformes parce que tout le monde se ressemble et pour les filles porter une cravatte c’est stupide.  Je voudrais être secrétaire.  Je veux travailler dans un bureau avec des ordinateurs. Je ne veux pas être vétérinaire.  Je ne veux pas travailler avec les animaux.  C’est ennuyeux.

That is the sum total of my French.  I hope it impresses you.  It impresses me, actually, that eight years later I am still able to recite without pausing for breath a stack of sentences which I memorised without understanding, but it is unlikely to impress anyone in France.  And so I am going to learn French, so that next time my boyfriend takes me to France I am not such an embarrassment and also so I can eavesdrop more effectively on what people are saying.  It’s very frustrating to know people are talking about you but not be able to understand the words

I already have a vast quantity of books, and an MP3 player with a Michel Thomas course on it, so the only explanation I will have for not being able to speak better French this time next year will be that I am lazy.  I am hoping to make good progress with it in January when I will be working away from home and able to spread all my books out in a hotel room and concentrate.  Learning French at home is problematic, because I don’t want anyone to know I am learning French.  It is, admittedly, a harmless enough pastime, but a curious person might wish to know why I am troubling to learn French, and I cannot think of a satisfactory answer.  To tell the truth, that I have been on holiday to France, is not an option because, as already alluded to, as far as some people are concerned I was in Düsseldorf in September, not Toulouse.

My second resolution is to lose weight.  I just told this to one of my friends and he said “Do you have any to lose?” which was nice of him, but actually I am almost a stone heavier than I was this time last year and so as of yesterday I am on a diet.  Not a diet that will involve much actual dieting, and certainly not one which will require me coming into contact with anything green, but I’m going to stop eating junk food between meals unless it’s a chocolate emergency, and make sure I walk four miles a day.  Losing weight will be greatly beneficial, because my current suit is going to holes and I have a new suit in the wardrobe which I need to be under 8 stone 5 to fit into.  If I could lose about half a stone, that would be perfect

My third resolution is to save money.  I already started off with this one before the New Year, and have set myself up an internet savings account into which I am going to transfer £500 a month.  I got a nasty shock a while ago when I realised I was spending as much as I earned, and so I have carried out a thorough review of my finances, including changing both my mobile phone tariffs to cheaper ones and resolving to keep careful track of the cash I spend.  At the end of each month I’m going to transfer anything I have left in my current account over to the savings account, and the hope is that I’ll soon (well, soon in a relatively long term sense of the word soon) have enough for a deposit on a house.  I might just about be able to scrape together a house deposit at the moment, but possibly not, and that would absorb every last penny I possess, which isn’t a sensible thing to do if you’re buying a house.  Houses need decorating and furnishing, and because unfortunately circumstances mean that I won’t be able to coordinate buying a house with getting married, I will have to buy all the furniture and appliances myself.  If I were going to get married people would buy me washing machines and tables and towels which would all be rather helpful, but that is not, I suppose, an argument to justify marriage :(  Hence my savings account.  It has just occurred to me that I could do interesting calculations about how many bars of chocolate I need to not eat until I can afford a washing machine, but perhaps that would be a bit sad

My fourth resolution is to learn to drive.  I really need to be able to drive for my job but haven’t learnt yet for a combination of reasons; not being well enough, being too busy and being too scared.  This is going to be the year when I start, although I may leave it until February.  I am trying to console myself that there are a lot of people I know who are quite stupid and yet perfectly well able to drive, but I am so terribly clumsy that I still have grave doubts about my own abilities.  This is another reason why I need to save lots of money; driving is expensive :(  Luckily, I have actually just got a pay rise

I have various other resolutions which aren’t important enough to merit their own numbers.  I need to be more conscientious at work, because it is probable that I will be staying at work longer than I once intended to.  Well, I intended to have left work several weeks ago when I failed my exams.  I want to become more confident and not so reluctant to talk to people, and possibly a bit more truthful towards certain members of my family.  I can see there would be advantages to having a life which is simpler than mine

How many of these things I will achieve is debatable, but I hope by writing them in public I will be somehow shamed out of deviating from them for fear of people asking me how I am getting on…

I have decided not to buy a paper diary by the way. I had a quick flick through last year’s diary yesterday, and it didn’t make very cheerful reading. Bizarrely, the first entry of 2007 ended with me asking God for the strength to cope with the year. I say bizarrely because I can’t imagine writing something like that now and I am curious about at what point I changed from being a person who could write that sort of thing to a person who could not.