Here we are, a couple of weeks into 2017, and I fear I may have already broken my New Year’s resolutions.

Well, I think so. To be quite honest, I can’t exactly remember what my resolutions were, so steeped was I in champagne and Snowballs on the night of 31st December. But, actually, it really doesn’t matter.

In all honesty, I don’t think this time of year is the best period to consider potential methods of becoming a better person. There is something so utterly uninspirational about the straining button on your jeans, the empty bottles of port and, particularly this year, the abundance of slurred family disputes over Brexit. (I wonder if there is a world record for the smallest number of drinks consumed before relatives are no longer able to restrain themselves and begin to liberally shotput the B-word across the room – my family suppressed such urges until almost the end of the evening; I’m sure yours did better!)

"Resolutions are so last week"

We think of ways to change and become better people all the time; it is, unsurprisingly, not a task exclusive to 31st December. If it were, what would we do if we thought of a life aspiration on, say January 15th? Should we wait? Should we phone the local gym and ask for a membership which will begin in twelve months time, because we couldn’t possibly become a new me without a new year? And what on earth would we do in the meantime? Stuff ourselves with lard and refuse any exercise for a year, until we are finally able to escape from the gluttony of ‘old me’ mode and emerge an entirely new being as soon as the next year has arrived? Of course not.

And yet it is on the 31st December that any personal ambitions we may have seem to matter the most. Why? The time has changed; we’ll keep scribbling a number six into a number seven slot for the next four months – but nothing is drastically different. However, if you are resolution-less as Big Ben begins to strike, you panic.

There is something so official about the start of the new year; we want the 2017 version of ourselves to utterly surpass our past selves in success – and yet we are only setting ourselves up to fail when we establish our aims for the year between extensive gulps of sherry. Most of us haven’t decided what they want to do in the next year until they are already several days into it. Indeed, though you might have had some potentially resolution-worthy ideas in the days preceding 31st December, as you begin to warble ‘Auld Lang Syne’ alongside the discordant symphony of your extended family’s grating and cacophonous tones, you struggle to remember what you said you wanted to complete, and why.

"You drink, and chat, and drink, and watch Robbie Williams embarrass himself and the entirety of humankind, and then stumble up to bed"

You drink, and chat, and drink, and watch Robbie Williams embarrass himself and the entirety of humankind, and then stumble up to bed; you cannot for the life of you remember what you said you wanted to do in the coming 365 days – and to be quite honest, you really don’t want to: twenty minutes of watching indistinguishable illuminations of the London Eye, followed by the heart-rendering scenes of Robbie’s desperate attempts to sanitise his hands after touching the verminous skin of a common person do spark a general weariness about the future, I’ve found.

Ditch the New Year’s resolution – not the wine

So the majority of us decide what resolutions to follow in the early days of the new year, often after admiring some #inspirationquotes on Instagram. But even these resolutions are hardly compulsory directives, etched onto monoliths that wouldn’t be out of place in Ed Miliband’s garden. In that first, bright period of the new year, it’s sinful to even consider neglecting your Facebook status updates of your resolution progress. But now? Resolutions are so last week.

Forging empty resolutions solely because the year has changed is a worthless task. It is much, much better to focus on ambitions for the future in your own time, at your own pace; and certainly without the external pressures of social media, which fuel an agonising sense of guilt if resolutions have not been fully attained. Some people like having a fresh, new start to their lives, and if that works for you, then that’s fantastic. But the desire to live up the unachievable ideal of ‘new year, new me’ often becomes gruesomely suffocating.

I’m glad I haven’t changed much since 2016; I’m glad I’m not a ‘new me’, not yet. I’m not drastically different from the me that existed less than two weeks ago – well, maybe I am still partially inebriated from Christmas Day, and I think I now consist of 80 per cent pigs-in-blankets (oh, and I do have a new haircut); but these are all things I could have done anytime, and I am proud of that. I don’t need my long-forgotten inebriations of resolutions I made on 31st December to help me change. I will change when I want to, and how I want to; and only then will I possibly be able to change for good