APART from giving the world sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, the Romans are also credited with introducing New Year resolutions.

Well I suppose, if you’ve spent the year conquering nations and not being particularly nice to the locals, while spending time off from warmongering over-indulging in Bacchanalian feasting and the odd orgy, it’s a good idea to appease the gods by starting the new calendar on the right foot.

What the Pythons left off the list of the improvements Roman occupation brought to the Holy Land of Brian and the Judean Popular Front, were the modern calendar and the tradition of making resolutions at New Year. However, they were not the first to make the New Year a holiday – that credit goes to the ancient Babylonians more than four millennia past.

Resolutions are purported to have originated in 153 BC when Janus, the mythical king from the mists of Roman history, was placed at the head of the calendar. As he had two faces he could, therefore, look back and forward at the same time. A handy skill in Rome when you never quite knew who might be creeping up behind you with dagger poised.

Here endeth this week’s history lesson with some modern facts hot from the calculators of those experts employed to survey social habits.

Those of you determined that from tomorrow you shall forever quit whichever health-threatening and nasty anti-social vice that is your penchant, may like to ponder that by this time next year only 12 per cent of you will have succeeded. Moreover, 30 per cent will have fallen by the wayside by next weekend and the rest will have slipped back into bad ways by the end of January.

Yet year in, year out we wake up on 1 January full of good intentions – only to fail miserably.

As our little rock sits in the Bay of St Malo awaiting the dawning of a new and uncertain year for its inhabitants, how’s about a few suggested resolutions for the ‘so-called’ great, the not-so-good and Joe Le Bien Public to follow in 2011.

May I be so bold as to beseech architects to do us all a favour by pledging not to design a single faux art deco building in the coming 12 months or thereafter. This over-worked style really is becoming so common and boring, to the point that a new pastiche is long overdue. Give us gothic, rococo, mock Tudor, baroque or even American colonial, but anything than art deco.

As times are hard, Planning supremo Freddie Cohen has a few hours to resolve to ditch the indulgent practice to taking a percentage of developers’ profits and spending it on public art. Who needs another statue, set of ornate security gates or wall plaque when charities are crying out for cash and the Island’s environment and heritage needs protecting?

With the jobless totals rising and more redundancies on the cards, how’s about our beloved politicians introducing a law that obliges directors and senior managers to take at least a 10 per cent wage cut before they lay off any staff? That way money can be diverted from the highly (and in some instances obscenely overpaid) to keep those who need a job to be able to support their families in gainful employment until business picks up.

The same goes for civil servants – especially those in the elite £60K Plus Club – who could easily take a voluntary five per cent salary reduction so the elderly need not face more cuts to essential benefits and pensions.

And, it is high time that our beloved politicians, who operate under the illusion that this Island must pay the top dollar to attract the ‘best’ people for the job, resolved to think long and hard about how to best spend taxpayers’ money.
While on the subject of the pampered birds in the Turkey Farm, would backbenchers resolve never to lodge a projet unless it has a real chance of succeeding? If they insist on tilting at windmills, such pointless activity should be conducted in his or her own time and not at public expense.

As for the coterie of ministers – in particular those flying hither and thither signing agreements with countries left, right and centre – how’s about raising the issue of human rights with those with dodgy track records when it comes to the basic democratic rights of freedom of thought, speech and association?

I refer in the main to China, our latest best friend and sacred milk cow when it comes to boosting the finance industry. The lofty likes of Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron’s entreaties on such matters may cut no ice with the Chinese, but that doesn’t mean that our great leaders should come over all timorous.

If there is one resolution worth making it is for the representatives of this Island to state, before they put pen to paper that regardless of what may be good business the Island does not condone forced abortions, detention without trail, a liberal application of the death penalty and the persecution of dissidents.

If the graduates of the Jeremy Clarkson School of Motoring and owners of motor vehicles the size of a small house extension thought they were getting off lightly they can think again! Either resolve to trade in the gas-guzzling monster for a normal car that fits the average parking space, or use a little less throttle by treating speed limits as the maximum and not the minimum.
Happy New Year.