Five New Year's Resolutions

Here are out top five New Year's resolutions. Try to stick to any new year's resolution you make. It's quite a challenge but if a new year's resolution is worth doing, it's maybe worth doing well.

In times of pandemic, it's hard to think of new year's resolutions. Social distancing, lock downs and fear stop us from learning and acting together. So our new year's resolutions are different from most, but that's where the challenge is!

1. Teach yourself something you've never done before, eg. piano, web design, a foreign language, carpentry, car mechanics. It's all out there on You Tube and other platforms.

2. Try to read at least 15 pages a day of a factual book. Our suggestions include Michelle Obama's 'Becoming', Karen Radner's 'Ancient Assyria: A Very Short Introduction', 'The Old Ways' by Robert Macfarlane and Alfred Hooper's classic, 'Makers of Mathematics'.

3. Here's a new year's resolution with a difference! Teach yourself how to develop software. Try starting here

4. Resolve to do at least one good turn a day. What's a good turn? It's something that you don't perhaps want to do, but which you should do in order to help someone else. It can be as simple as a phone call, a garden tidied or a wave. After a while you'll forget that you didn't want to do things, and it will just come naturally. This new year's resolution will probably be your best.

5. Try not to buy anything plastic for a year.

• About 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic has been produced since the 1950s – the weight of roughly a billion elephants or 47 million blue whales.

• Only about 9% of this plastic has been recycled, 12% has been burned and the remaining 79% has ended up in landfills or the environment.

• Up to 12.7 million tonnes of plastic enters the oceans every year.

• The equivalent of a truckload of plastic enters the oceans every minute.

• There are five trillion pieces of plastic in our oceans – enough to circle the Earth over 400 times.

Have a happy New Year!