What are your New Year resolutions?
| 15:01 UK time, Thursday, 6 January 2011
I used to take New Year festivities much more seriously.
Many of the short stories I wrote as a teenager either start, happen or end on the 31 December.
I felt it was a clear watershed between something old and something new.
During my childhood, my friends and I were children of many different creeds and nations.
We used to sing Ramadan songs during Muslim Ramadan, Easter songs during Christian Easter, snowdrop songs during the pagan festivities.
When I came to Britain I easily adapted to the mandatory stuffed turkey for Christmas.
I made allowances for it by saying that we are celebrating the birthday of the Prophet Isa-Messiah - as Jesus Christ is known in Islam.
Somehow this year I lost the edginess I usually have for New Year.
This year me and my wife we spent our New Year eve with old English friends.
We nearly joined in with the annual moaning about the fire works being too loud.
As for New Year resolutions, until recently I used to fill up the first few pages of my diary with my plans for the coming year: yoga classes or learning another language.
The books I have written first appeared in those lists of resolutions.
Lists of objectives have given me structure through my life.
On the other hand, when I look through my diaries now, I can see (according to words of a Russian poet Sergey Esenin) "how few roads were taken, how many mistakes were made".
If each convition to learn to play a musical instrument were converted into a single note, I would have composed a symphony by now.
It has never happened.
But the resolution remains in pen and ink.
And then this year I couldn't summon up the enthusiasm for a single resolution.
I asked myself, am I finally at the edge of wisdom?
There is one, however, that came to me through a third party.
In Eastbourne - where we spent first days of this year - an elderly English lady, Beryl, half-jokingly made me concede to go with my wife to a Scottish dances class this year - an act which I would never countenance on my own.
So now I've gone public with this resolution, it can't be hidden or lost among hundreds of others.
Either I'll defeat Scottish dance or it will trample me down.
Please console me! And tell me: what were your New Year resolutions?
Writer in residence Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek novelist and poet. His work is banned in Uzbekistan and under threat of arrest he moved to London and joined ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ World Service as a journalist. He is now head of the Central Asian service. 