New Year's Resolutions- Postponed Already!?

I thought I'd get a jumpstart on my resolutions,ship-shape and all that, but damn! There's still half a baklava on my kitchen counter, and half a dozen cold lamb chops in the frig. A bottle of Veuve Cliquot stares at me languorously, orangely, from beside the lambchops: "New Year's Eve is coming. Don't clamp down yet!" It's not fair that it's so much fun to eat and drink with abandon.

Forty years ago, while visiting an elderly woman in rural North Carolina, I was offered a dish of fresh warm blueberry cobbler that was just sublime. I requested the recipe, which came with a very special caveat. She said "I use a lot of sugar in it because my taste buds is high. So if you have high taste buds, you'll want to do that too." Well honey, my taste buds is high so a resolution to hurry up and get fit is no fun thing at all.

It's my grandmother's fault, God rest her soul, and, come to think of it, her mother's before her. They baked the best ginger cookies in the world, huge round soft rolled-out things with one little chocolate chip in the middle. You would eat five of them just to get at the chocolate chips. So here I am, damned unto the fourth generation with the sweet tooth from hell.

But it's not all a bad thing. A piece of Christmas cake here, my son Will's superb sticky-toffee pudding there. There's time. The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but the road to heaven surely is too.