Shropshire Magazine

Ladies First

Introducing Ladies First, a new column by VLT, taking a generally light-hearted look at the world from a woman’s perspective

Don’t you just love this time of year? Everywhere you looked before Christmas there were handy tips on how to make your festive season as fabulous as Nigella’s, Jamie’s, Gordon’s or Hugh’s.

Throw together a few choice ingredients, add soft lighting and mood music, a random handful of impossibly gorgeous and entertaining friends, forget to invite the relatives, and suddenly Christmas can be that perfect.

For the past few years we’ve had the added fun of trying to aspire to an organic and environmentally friendly Yule too. I still dream of finding an organic, free-range turkey that can walk with impressively tiny carbon footprints to my solar-powered oven, gathering pesticide-free veg en route, while wrapping ethically sourced pressies in recycled paper with his wings. 

It will be interesting to see how the organic market fared in the current financial climate, and whether tighter budgets resulted in less demand for higher-priced festive food. But you can be tight and green – just ask my children. They really enjoyed chopping up old cards to make gift tags and paper chains, and making homemade gifts for grannies – well tiddler did, the teens have only just started speaking to me again, but that’s a Christmas tradition in our home anyway! 

And no sooner has Santa popped back up the chimney and the relatives gone home, than the pressure of self-improvement descends – the dreaded New Year Resolutions. 

Cartoon by Norman Hood: www.normanhood.co.uk

It’s no real surprise that after a week of complete gluttony more than half of the UK population resolves every year to eat or drink less. It’s also no surprise to any of us that once the indigestion has passed most people plunge straight off the food-and-drink wagon before the end of January.

Getting fit is another popular pledge that for many is doomed to failure because what can be more depressing than trekking to the gym on bleak midwinter nights? How much more civilised to start working out in the spring with the incentive of balmy days, summer clothes and holiday flirtations. 

Banned

Apparently fewer people this year will resolve to stop smoking than ever before. The healthy living brigade put this down to the fact that most people gave up when smoking in public places was banned – either that or during the New Year Resolution poll they were outside in the pub gazebo having a fag. 

It’s particularly ironic in these recession hit times that two resolutions featuring heavily on Top 10 lists include ‘Spending less time at work’ and ‘Spending more time with the family’. Sadly for many people in 2009 this will be a decision out of their hands and not something they will have wished for. 

This New Year why don’t we all ditch the quest for perfection and resolve to remain resolutely irresolute? Let’s instead let nature (and gravity) run their course, be kind to each other, indulge in a little of what we fancy and try to enjoy the good things about life, even in difficult and challenging times. 

Wishing you all a happy, healthy and peaceful 2009.

Of course, in the real world Christmas is less aspiration, more perspiration