If you make one resolution this year, make it this

I’ve heard some crazy things this year. There’s been the usual: learn a language, stop smoking, lose three stone by the summer, find a girlfriend etc., but every year resolutions seem to become more and more phantasmagorical.

“I’m going celibate this year – women are too expensive,” I heard a commuter shout to his mate above the Tube racket. “I’m having a six-month social media detox,” said another. “I’m quitting my job, moving to Alaska and living as a nomad,” said a good friend (who wears a suit every day and will never leave the city in his lifetime).

The problem with these elaborate ideas is that they set people up for failure and disappointment, something to eat away at you towards the end of the year when it dawns on you, bright and painful, that you didn’t meet your goals. In fact you fell hugely far from them.

You’ve already got drunk, sad and fat and spent the whole the past week on Tinder, swiping right with a veracity that threatens to break your screen. You got FOMO and logged into Facebook on January 2, only to be met with 3035 photos of people sharing a photo of a firework. And wake up, you aren’t going to become a hermit – your parents didn’t put you through school and university to watch you grow a bushy beard and adopt the smell of a beetroot forgotten in the fridge for a month.

The key is to be realistic. Add on to an existing hobby, or increase your knowledge in an area of interest already harboured. There is one place where we can always improve: our manner, etiquette and the way we carry ourselves. Like the endangered species that used to roam the land in thick numbers, so too the gentleman is a dying breed. The chivalrous, courteous, generous, forgiving, accepting, loyal and proud man is threatened with extinction.

So, this year, rather than getting bogged down in the intricacies of vanity, if you are to make one single resolution this year, make it this: to be a better gentleman.

Give up your seat, walk kerbside, hold the door open, never forget to say thank you, hold her umbrella in the rain, pay for her taxi, take an interest in people, care for your presentation, set an example. The world needs more full time gentlemen – those for whom it is a part time role are merely ‘men’, blending into the crowd.

While being a gentleman should not be given a timeframe, for those who can honestly say they have let it slip – ignored the woman with a heavy bag on the stairs because you were in a rush, not stopped to help someone in need, done something you regretted or carried a burden of guilt for – then the fad of New Year resolutions offers the perfect, realistic chance to better yourself.

Make 2016 the year you became a better gentleman.

Main Photo by Adam Fussell // Styled by Holly Macnaghten