Have you given up on your New Year’s resolution yet?

A black and white vintage photo of a young woman in a patterned dress sitting at a desk, writing a letter with pen and ink, looking slightly upward and smiling.

It is January, and so arrives the allocated moment to fantasise about how you might transform yourself. What is it this year: will you take up trampolining, learn Chinese, undergo a full personality transplant?

I’ll admit, I find it easy to be sceptical about New Year’s resolutions. But with Christmas being the occasion when society comes closest to collectively switching off, it’s no surprise we all start to visualise how we might change our lives. As a teenager, my New Year’s resolution was often to write a daily diary, an aspiration that would inevitably peter out, be picked up, peter out again, only to be pondered once more on the following January 1 as a viable ambition.