It was something of a relief when my colleague on the Catholic Herald emailed me to tell me that I didn’t need to write about my New Year resolutions after all. The project was not going to run.
I was very grateful. I hadn’t been able to work out how much pretence and deceit this act of authorial responsibility was going to cost me. Whatever heterodoxies lap around my ankles, Pelagianism isn’t one of them. I have never believed that New Year resolutions can have any effect other than demoralisation, but exposing quite how flaky and fragile the will is. I don’t make them.
