What is the key to keeping your New Year’s resolutions? Ignore them!

A LIST of ideas that should be smashed to smithereens and avoided at all costs

I LOVE lists. Especially lists in alphabetical order. In fact, I love them so much I’ll share with you my latest for 2016. About New Year’s resolutions that should be smashed to smithereens, and what you should avoid at all costs.

1. Cookery shows on TV. Cook a gourmet meal in 30 minutes? Well, with superb knife skills, zillions of exotic ingredients and a professional kitchen/chef at your disposal. Simples! 

2. Kids’ carol concerts. Maybe I’m in a minority but I can’t stand carol concerts with five-year-olds singing tunelessly and one little brat taking over as if auditioning for the X Factor. 

3. Loudmouths. Who immediately comes to mind? Trumpeting his own  loudmouth? Well, Donald Trump, naturally. Not to mention his ego, enough of that to make topless calendar boy Vladimir Putin look self-effacing. 

Talk about dumping Trump from the UK, how about some others, too? Like  Jean-Claude Juncker, who’s forever pontificating to Brits how they should run their country, when he’s made such a shambles of running the EU. 

Who would you ban? Feel free to add your own names either online under this piece, or in the newspaper. 

4. Piped muzak in stores, especially Christmas jingles. Stores spend millions on what customers see but zilch on what they hear. Poor assistants have to endure it all year long.

5. Product placement on TV, in books. (Oops. In one novel in my own thriller series, one cigarette brand is named, I don’t smoke. Honestly!)

6. Slebs. All those sanctimonious ‘celebrities’, who tell us how to run our lives whilst failing to realise just how dysfunctional their own are.  

7. Spam. Got spammed by a message purporting to be anti-spam but which came from a site advertising, yes you guessed it, Viagra, fake Rolexes. So please, anti-spam software that works. Just get it done. 

8. Wish lists that are never, ahem, fulfilled. Ah, well, there’s always next year’s … it’s being so cheerful that keeps me going! Happy New Year!

Nora Johnson’s thrillers ‘Landscape of Lies’, ‘Retribution’, ‘Soul Stealer’, ‘The De Clerambault Code’ (www.nora-johnson.com) available from Amazon in paperback/eBook (€0.89;£0.79) and iBookstore. All profits to Cudeca charity.