New Year is a great time for resolutions. Each year we promise (or at least I do!) to lose some weight; take exercise; drink a little less; save a little more and be a bit more considerate.
Invariably these are more annual aspirations than achievable goals, as by mid-December the girth has expanded an extra inch, the imbibing is no less enthusiastic and the fuel-guzzling car ensures that my wallet is lighter and not my body-fat ratio.
My greatest fear as I grow older is a rapid descent into a Victor Meldrew-type character but the opposite seems to be happening. I am less bothered year on year by life's little annoyances.
Take British ministers making decisions which affect our lives without being accountable to the people.
They are imposing water charges, shaking up the civil service, facing up to our over-dependency on the public sector, calling us 'spongers' and continuing to pay for the charade of a suspended assembly. All these are things that would have annoyed me in the past. Now I could not give a fig. It is not that I don't care. I do but any return to a devolved administration must be based on realism.
One way or another we will have to pay our own way, as the annual Exchequer subvention will not continue as in the past. Yet that penny doesn't seem to have dropped with some of our local representatives.
Lack of political progress on the domestic front is irritating but not as irritating as getting an administration up and running only to see it fall at the first hurdle it meets.
The governments should be clear about their intentions and should announce that this failed assembly will not meet in any shape or form.
They should announce that the next assembly elections will be in May 2007 and that the interim time will be used for political discussions and the creation of a framework that is backed by a five-year plan. (forget programmes for government!)
To cobble together (and that's what it would be) an interim assembly in mid-2006 for less than a year would be ridiculous in the extreme.
No sooner would ministerial asses be settled onto the velvet chairs at Stormont than the electioneering would begin.
If a local devolved administration is to stand any chance of survival it has to be given the best possible chance to survive and literally giving its members a get-out-of-jail card quickly is not the best way forward. Yet does anyone care?
I used to get annoyed too at the presence of the International Monitoring Commission, as it was set up three years too late to be of any significance to our political process.
Now I could not care less if it declared that Gerry Adams was a saint and Johnny Adair had joined the Salvation Army, because it can say whatever it likes whenever it likes, that's how it works.
To declare a clean bill of health for the organisations it is monitoring in the time-frame it is being set, the chairman of the commission should be Derren Brown and not John Alderdice. But I don't care.
The government is to persist with its controversial and odious 'On the Run' legislation, but who cares?
Sinn Féin says it doesn't want it but secretly it really does. The Ulster Unionists want it but only if it covers rogue police officers. The SDLP doesn't want it because it doesn't have any on the runs. The DUP really wants it but won't say that out loud.
The government doesn't want to implement it but for some reason feels it has to because it promised it. Now that's a first, but who cares? Surely the on the runs don't intend coming back from sunnier climes to the grey skies of Fermanagh?
The new year for politics is as ethereal as many of our resolutions. It is full of good intentions with no real idea as to how we achieve them.
We all know what has to be done but if anyone believes we will see Paisley shaking hands with Adams under the shadow of Carson on this side 2006 then they are more foolish than optimistic.
Good faith and trust does have to be won and then secured.
The fallout of the Sinn Féin and British government spymaster ring has ensured that there is neither trust nor faith in the process or between the protagonists.
The ultimate irony occurred when Sinn Féin met the government to call foul play over who should be spying on whom!
There will be, no doubt, more such ironies to come, but whatever does, 2006 could not be more intriguing than 2005.
Of course that depends on whether you or anyone else cares any more. Happy New Year – I am off to the gym via Bridge Bar.
