I hardly make resolution lists. Apparently they don’t work for me. Perhaps it’s the way I make them. But this year I’ve changed my mind. I need some goals to focus on. I’m really determined to carry out my plans.

Resolution 1: I’m going to write a novel. For many years I wanted to start doing this, but now I’m definitely going to write it. I’ve already got a working title: “Grown up without e-mail”. When I was young, I wrote a lot of letters to my pen pals and I received a lot of letters too. I still have them on a bookshelf. I can take them in my hands and read them again and again, thinking about the young people who wrote them and what they were going to do in their lives. Nowadays young people don’t write letters anymore. They use modern techniques such as e-mail, chat and text messages. After a while they lose or delete them. They won’t have the opportunity to read their writings again when they’re sixty. Communication has become much more volatile.

But writing a novel will take too much of my time. Instead, I’m going to write a short story about the subject. Forty pages will do. At an average of two days a page, that’s eighty days of work. Too much again. I’ve only got 25 holidays a year. So, writing a short story isn’t a good idea as well. The only thing left is a one-pager. However, this will be too short to explain the subject.

I’ve got a solution. I’m going to write an e-mail to all my friends, inviting them to write letters to me. This will give me enough time to work out my second resolution.

Resolution 2: According to my GP, I should exercise more. I’ve decided I’m going to start playing tennis. I’m also going to run twice a week and I’m going to swim each morning. On Sundays I’m going for a walk in the countryside. All of that will make me a very healthy person.

But I can sense the problem of time reappear. I’ve got to delete some ideas. I’ll stick to the idea of going for a walk on Sunday mornings. Getting up at 9.00, and having a full breakfast until 10.30 leaves me … just half an hour to walk around the block of houses where I live. I’ll have to be back at 11.00 to prepare lunch. Well, at least this will leave me enough time to work out my first resolution.