"Resolutions...for the Next Lap of the Year"

Six weeks of give-up-a-carb per week are now over and surprising newness has happened.  Perhaps the heartbreak of all too real problems in the rest of the world has put first world carboholic problems into perspective.  If you have a lovely life and know it, how best to deal with the fact that so many others don’t?  Guilt changes nothing but your own mental health.  Being stuck in sadness won’t stop mudslides.  For the moment, all I can think of is shift grief to hope for peace and stability, take a month-long break from YouTube and social media, stop stress-eating chocolate and try very hard not to lose temper or patience with people in Sainsbury’s. 

Last time I was there and looked around at the passing faces, most had a grey, draining weariness about them.  Perhaps that’s the nature of food-shopping, although it’s more likely they’d just seen the price of a chicken.  Noticed the faces as had started at the far end of the store to get pantry staples first, picking up fresh items just before checkout, so was trolleying in the opposite direction.  Makes for an interesting, salmon-swimming-upstream shop, but ensures chilled products last the hour-long drive home.  Has the added bonus of avoiding couples blocking the entrance and vegetable aisles wrestling their coughing and/or screaming toddlers who don’t want to be put into shopping trolley seats.  Couldn’t one parent stay home, with child and Calpol? 

So much for not losing patience. 

Apparently, it takes forty-eight days to break a habit and reduce cravings.  Emotions replace notions.  Newness, creativity and some temper issues, flood in.  Next experiment for the month of September; a single carb per week.  Some things (cakes and biscuits) remain off the cards until Christmas as have no self-control.  God help the folk in Sainsbury’s.

Diary entry Friday 2 January 1931 “Resolutions for the next three months, the next lap of the year”.  Woolf, V 1931; Oliver Bell, Anne and McNellie, Andrew (eds). ‘The Diary of Virginia Woolf Vol 4 1931-1935’. Granta Books 2023