My New Year resolutions...

1. Do not stop smoking. I'll call off my regular encounters with the business end of a cigarette when the government calls off it's killjoy anti-smoker bullying campaigns, allows us back into the pubs, ceases to extort us with ever-increasing VAT taxes, relents on its second-hand smoke emotional blackmail based on highly dubious evidence, and stops insulting my intelligence with plans to place pictures of burnt-out lungs on cig packages (I can read, thank you). Until then, it's war. From my cold, dead fingers...

2. Make work of joining a Church. Which is likely going to be the lutheran Church of Sweden.

3. Get my academic research back to some empirical meat-and-gravy stuff. Try to get at least one paper dealing with corpus-based historical linguistics issues done by the end of the year. If current research proposal falls through, develop a new and exciting one. Look for some hard-to-get material that no one ever took a close look at before.

4. Take up writing poetry again. I'm inspired, the ideas are there - but I simply haven't taken the time to write them down. It'd be a good way to pass the time on the train to and from work.

5. Eat more healthily. Meaning: buy less ready-made salads with stuff I do not know the name of and skip the leaves, and eat more red meat with yellow sauce, beans with brown sauce, and brown meat with red sauce.

6. Visit another country than Finland, Sweden or The Netherlands. In order of preference:
- Northern England or Scotland
- Cape town, South Africa
- Constantinople

7. Buy a plant and make sure it does not die within three months. If successful, buy other plant to keep first plant company. If nervous, rehearse with plastic plant first.