Make a New Year Resolution for a friend, and help improve all our lives

New Year Resolutions go back a long way. Which is just as well, since they don’t go forward a long way - most of them don’t last beyond February.

Rumour hath it that it was the Babylonians who invented the idea. If they did, it clearly didn’t do them any good. How many Babylonians do any of us know, these days?

Admittedly, the early Christians also believed that the first day of the New Year should be devoted to looking back at past failings and resolving to do better. But if you’re hanging around a catacomb to avoid being fed to a lion and have nothing to do but wait for the next “Christianity for Dummies” letter from that control freak Paul, what are your alternatives?

Given its phenomenal failure rate, it’s amazing that New Year Resolution-making survives. It isn’t just a triumph of hope over experience. It’s the triumph of dull, predictable hope over experience. People decide to lose weight, give up smoking, cut down on the drink or stop swearing. That’s about it. Now and then someone eschews biting their fingernails or resolves to take the stairs rather than the lift, but the majority of New Year resolutions are too boring and negative to improve even the life of the resolver, never mind the lives of the rest of us.

If they ARE to improve the lives of the majority, New Year Resolutions shouldn’t be undertaken by you and me. We know that doesn’t work. They should be DREAMED UP by you and me and applied - forcefully - to third parties.

They wouldn’t all have to be severely demanding. It wouldn’t kill anybody to respond to the question “How are you?” with a “Grand” and it would measurably reduce the international boredom level. 74% of world boredom is caused by those dreadful people who answer - at enthusiastic length - purely social-ritual questions like “How was the holiday?” “Married life treating you OK?” and “Did your car have any trouble with the NCT?”

Our politicians could improve our lives no end, this coming year, if they adopted a few New Year resolutions. For example, if Pat Rabbitte were to resolve to go back to being funny and move away from boiled rage, everybody would be happier. Enda Kenny’s New Year Resolution would be even simpler: Just keep taking the tablets.

It would help, also, if politicians of all parties involved in the forthcoming by-election in Meath were to resolve to do away with the doorsteps cliché. The minute an election is announced, politicians start blithering about what they’re “hearing from the doorsteps,” which has to be the most contemptuous way to describe constituents. (Don’t tell me it’s figurative. Meath has so many apartment blocks these days, a doorstep is a nostalgic rarity, like a spittoon or a Telex machine.)

During that by-election, too, commentators might resolve to avoid the handy nugget of received wisdom about Sinn Féin working harder on the ground than any other political party does. This should be an effective New Year resolution partly because received wisdom never is. (That last sentence makes more sense than you might think.)

More importantly, this assertion about SF on the ground tends to draw Fergus Finlay down upon you in full Old Testament mode, as I found when I used it on a radio programme a few weeks back. Although he didn’t quite say a)“This statement is the last refuge of the lazy political scoundrel” b) “Is supported by damn all in the way of evidence” and c) “Makes me, Fergus Finlay, want to smite you, big time, with a handy phone,” all three implications were carried by his polite but gritted-teeth response.

A fair amount of teeth-gritting on the part of listeners would be obviated if radio current affairs broadcasters made a New Year Resolution to employ their faders more vigorously throughout 2005. (Faders are control leavers that can drop the volume on an incoming phone call or on a contributor in a distant studio.)

A fader was used to great effect on Today FM recently, when the presenter got good and mad with a Fianna Fáil councillor who was convinced all she had to do was keep saying the same thing again and again like a CD with a scratch in it. The presenter of the programme pulled the fader, turning the contributor into a radio goldfish: we could all imagine her mouth opening and closing without a sound coming out.

A lot more fader activity would improve political discourse no end. To ensure fairness, broadcasters might have a standard preliminary patter before pulling the lever, so the waffler could know they were dead man (or woman) talking: “I’ve warned you twice that you’re not answering the question, that you’re banging on about a completely irrelevant topic and that you won’t shut up to let your opponent get a word in. If you don’t stick a sock in it within 30 seconds, I will. Electronically.”

An early candidate for application of this sock would be Gerry Adams,

Green politicians and other environmentalists who rightly want to radically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels should have, as their New Year resolution, a determination to re-examine wind power, now that wind turbines have emerged as the single biggest killer of endangered airborne species.

Up to recently, most species seemed to be endangered by vicious hunters pointing rifles at them and flogging their beaks to Chinese medicine makers to grind up into aphrodisiacs. However, while hunters may be bad for elephants and other ivory-bearing mammals, they’re not half as effective at in-flight massacre as are wind farms. Winged species ranging from golden eagles to bats are being liquidised in large numbers by wind turbines. The Washington Post, this weekend, says one wind farm in the Appalachian, on its own, has terminated 4,000 bats. The bat-supply could run out, if wind farms keep knocking hell out of them.

Of course, the really disappointing aspect of this bat carnage is how ineffective the bat radar system is proving to be. We were all brought up to admire the fact that, while they might be a bit short-sighted, bats could send out a dotted line of squeaks that bounced back when the squeaks met an obstruction. Dotted lines mustn’t work so well with moving targets like wind turbines.

Triple-sided kisses are nearly as dangerous to me as wind turbines are to bats. Because I never know which side to go for in one of those kisses, I do a confused facial feint which involves me in unsought violent intimacy with the other person’s nose. Everybody who does these “look left, then right” (or “look right, then left”) greetings - particularly MEPs, who use them to prove how European they are - should make a New Year Resolution to go back to the handshake. At most.

The ideal would be to do away with this germ-passing soft-and-fuzzy promiscuity of pretended initial warmth altogether.

I mean, how bad is a friendly nod?