Competition | 3 January 2009

In Competition No. 2576 you were invited to submit New Year’s resolutions of well-known figures past and present.

There can be no finer example to the goal-setting constituency than Jaspistos who, in his late forties though not necessarily at New Year, resolved to do three things which he had regarded with particular dread: to attend an encounter group, to make a parachute jump, and to answer a sex advertisement in person. He achieved all three and emerged in one piece, which puts to shame those unimaginative souls who annually pledge to lose weight, assert control over their finances, find a soulmate, and perhaps do some sort of voluntary work.

I liked Derek Morgan’s Samuel Plimsoll: ‘Draw a line and move on’, and W.J. Webster’s Lord Mandelson: ‘In due course I shall float the Lord Home precedent, but not yet.’ And Shirley Curran proposed the following resolution for one of her fellow competitors, Bill Greenwell: ‘I’ll stop entering Speccie competitions so that other people have a chance to win.’ An honourable mention goes to Steven Baldock and the winners, printed below, get £30 each. There were a few Henry Jameses this week but the best came from Adrian Fry, who bags the bonus fiver. Happy New Year!

Embracing that tradition by which a good many members of society have seen fit to take the turning of the year, not to mention the somehow challenging prospect of a diary as yet clear of engagements, as a signal necessitating their embarkation upon a declared programme of self improvement, perhaps adopting some new mode of behaviour deemed beneficial or virtuous, else abandoning activities upon which society might well frown, I, Henry James, give notice that from the commencement of this coming January and for a theoretically infinite, though more predictably indefinite, period thereafter, it is my avowed intention to attempt to desist from a certain characteristic trait evident in my prose, the net effect of my circumscription of this trait to be nothing less than a reduction in the circumlocutive quality of the very sentences of which my works, be they epistolary or novelistic in nature, have hitherto been constructed.