New Year's Resolutions are a bit silly.
Given that they are invariably announced inwardly with wobbly eyes at 12.01 on New Year's Day when you're kissing a policeman, they really don't have much validity.
But yes, I have had New Year's Resolutions in my time. Never kept any of them.
But I respect this quixotic Uruguayan tradition, so this year I chose to have three, which I intend to complete BEFORE New Year's Eve.
New Year's Presolutions.
The first one is to read Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries.
Most people I will meet during the holiday break will have read it, so I just have to climb up on that truck and say, yes, I danced to that one, like a crazy man.
But it's a big fecker, Jimmy, and my doctors have told me not to lift things or a stomach filled with scar tissue will burst and splatter.
So I kindled it, which means I am checking percentages, not pages, and I am 8% in. Not much is it? I am going to have to read like the wind by December 31.
But I like it.
Slow, enthralling, detailed.
She must have known it was going to be big before she began.
The second Presolution is to wear the suit, made in Vietnam, I bought on Trade Me six months ago, never worn.
Except by me when it arrived, in front of a mirror.
It fitted like gladwrap around a toddler's play-time sandwich.
I haven't worn a suit since working at The Evening Star for six weeks before university, I thought a suit was in order.
Italian, thin lapels, nifty and sharp. With green suede boots, I looked like a friend of the Beatles.
And it worked.
Before, the only thing girls said to me at parties was where is the bathroom, four eyes?
Suited, I was swamped with The Real Stuff.
Then I went off to university, T-shirt and jeans, which I still wear, and the only thing I heard from girls at parties was, oh, sorry, I thought you were someone else. I am determined to wear this suit by New Year's Eve.
The third Presolution is to write a song.
A decent song.
I nibbled when young, wrote the odd one, found the melodies weren't so very hard - Lou Reed said you only need three chords - and assumed the words would come easily if I could ever be bothered.
If the Bee Gees could get away with ''I fell out of bed/hurting my head/from things that I said'', then really, the bar wasn't very high.
But the years went by and I just never got around to sitting down with a furrowed brow and drawn curtains - there was always something on the telly.
Now, with my lovely old almost-in-tune piano, I am noodling every day.
Why, already I have four completed songs that sound, call me old-fashioned, as good as Lorde.
Last week I put the best one in my brain by banging my head with my fist as I played it, and retired to the computer to write the words.
Then took them back to the piano.
Mistake.
The two were as different as chalk and cheese, though perhaps that is the wrong analogy, as I once ate chalk and cheese together when excessively inebriated.
And they tasted exactly the same. Perhaps as different as a Mackintosh's Toffee and a wombat's gall bladder?
Though, again, in confirming facts for this column, as I religiously do every week, two high-school class-mates reminded me I had eaten both those two at the same time as well.
And smiled broadly.
Talking Heads' David Byrne told me once over lunch at the (then) Town House that he wrote words with closed eyes, singing whatever came into his head as he played.
I will try that.
By December 31. I know I am cutting it fine trying to read a big fat clever book and writing a song worthy of a walk across the 2016 Grammys stage in a Vietnamese suit.
But New Year's Resolutions are rarely achieved either.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
