Maybe the simple New Year’s Resolution can help us all look at the bigger picture, but in order to do that I’m guessing we’ll probably have to keep them past January!

Okay so like most people I have massively over indulged this Christmas. Yet I feel that I have had more reason than normal this year to eat and drink in excess. My birthday falls on the 24^th December. Yes, that’s right Christmas Eve, and I’ve long since gotten over the fact that whenever I have to give my date of birth the first thing that gets said to me straight after is; “do you know your birthday’s on Christmas eve?” (If that’s what you were thinking) I also, sadly, tragically, somewhat depressingly, turned 30. This meant that in the lead up to my birthday, and then on my birthday I was drinking and celebrating (and obviously eating) a lot, then you have Christmas, then the leftover period, and before you know it you’re into the New Year festivities.

Anyway, back on point, I like most people have massively over indulged this Christmas. So I, like most people of my age group (please no one comment that I have slipped into a different tick box on forms) will be doing dry January from the moment that I am sober on New Year’s day, and I will also be starting some diet of one kind or another. Probably taking the advice from whichever of my friends reckons they know someone who knows someone who lost half their body mass in a month!

More seriously though, the dieting and non drinking aside, it is that time of year when you can reflect on the year gone by or alternatively look forward and plan and hope for the year ahead.

What will be the great resolutions of 2013? For President Obama, well surely he has the greatest resolution to make? Can he forge a path in America’s history where gun control can finally be brought under some element of I don’t know, let’s say, control? Where the right to bear arms which was arguably never intended by the founding fathers to allow anyone and everyone outside of the militia the right to buy guns, machine guns, and rifles and shoot up innocent people can be amended?

The founding fathers had a common enemy when they wrote the Second Amendment. It was an occupying force. The enemy was not small primary school children. It was not any children. It was not any innocent man, woman, or child for that matter. As an Englishwoman I have no qualms in writing this (also it’s historically accurate), it was us. We did it! We were the enemy. We were being greedy and colonial, but times have changed and the right to bear arms is surely passed. Although that said, I don’t think anyone has a problem with farmers, hunters, or the army having guns. Surely as always, gun control as with most political wrangling it’s a matter of degrees.

What I do think would be terrifying to see in 2013 would be the whole of America armed in a response to the government’s failure to deal with gun control. Yet this seems to be an approach favoured by the head of the NRA Wayne LaPierre when he was speaking in his response to the recent shootings in Newport. Instead of showing any kind of humility in the face of tragedy, his response was to become like a parody of a Hollywood blockbuster, he said what you could be forgiven for thinking was the kind of thing Al Capone might once have said (granted if you swap around where good guy and bad guy are in the sentence); "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." No Wayne LaPierre, no! All this does is arm people and raise the probability of more innocent people getting caught up in the cross fire!

Turning away from what could be the greatest resolution of 2013, I want to look at what could be great resolutions for us all to try and keep and these are based on the findings of a nurse who has spent her career in palliative care looking after the elderly. She found that the elderly and dying had very similar regrets, and here are the top five;

1.     I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2.     I wish I hadn't worked so hard.

3.     I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.

4.     I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5.     I wish that I had let myself be happier.

I want to say that going in to 2013 I will make each of these a personal resolution. Yet sadly I know that this is a rather flippant thing to write, I also know that I’m already breaking 3 and 4 as I write. 4 in so far as I’ve just silenced a call from a friend so that I can finish writing this blog, and 3 because sadly I’m quintessentially English (and I don’t mean that in a good way). Yet I can honestly say in the couple of days between Christmas and New Year, I absolutely excelled at 2!

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