New year resolutions are all very well – but you’re taking your old self with you

Poet and artist Frieda Hughes explores the goodbye of the new year to the old – and to a friend – and reminds us that we need realism to temper the resolutions

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2025

Happiest wishes hang like festive baubles

From every email and text message until way past the fifth,

After which, seasonal pleasantries have worn themselves thin,

And I can get to the point without ornamentation,

Take down the decorations that adorn my doorway and hall,

And pack up the Christmas cards, suddenly old,

In the sharp of the January cold. They are dateline leftovers

As we all jump the river Styx that separates last year from this,

Hoping to leave much of what we were before

Shrivelling on the other bank, in the light of new resolutions.

Only to discover that we have dragged our old selves with us,

Unable to separate our parts by the sharp edge of the year’s end

Although it divides at midnight, like a cleaver.

The post-Christmas funeral of a friend I would dance with

At Christmas parties, while others flagged,

Ended with the strains of Abba’s “Dancing Queen”,

And four days later I heard it again as the New Year

Stepped over the exhausted remains of its predecessor,

And the conga scuttled past in its trousers and skirts to the “goodbye”

Of the Town Crier’s last cry as she retires.