Hootenanny!

Note: The following has been slightly edited, much as this goes against my stream-of-consciousness principles, in case I get sued by the person I originally named in Resolution 4. He has been replaced by Wilson, the Space Aubergine, a character I just invented who bears no resemblance to any human or aubergine living or dead.

Happy New Year, everyone! My resolutions:

1) To develop a new kind of trousers that are somewhere between the full-length kind and those weird three-quarter-length ones that cool people wear nowadays, and become a millionaire by selling them. The secret to this will be to buy lots of normal trousers in bulk and sell them to people who are one-eighth of a leg taller than the people the trousers were designed for.

2) To encourage people to wear skirts on top of their seven-eighths-length trousers, thus doubling the profits of my clothing company and making me a millionaire.

3) To start up a clothing company of some kind in order to facilitate resolutions one and two, and encourage gullible people to invest hugely in "Memory Clothes plc - the only clothing company endorsed by a World Memory Champion as far as is known", thus making me a millionaire before I even sell any trousers or skirts.

4) Consult someone like Wilson, the space aubergine for advice on how to encourage gullible people to invest in manifestly unprofitable schemes like the above, but present the request for help in such an exciting way that instead of me paying him for the consultation, he gives me lots of money as well as the advice, thus making me a millionaire before I even act on the advice received.

5) Set some lateral-thinking expert like Edward de Bono the challenge of re-ordering my resolution list in such a way that I don't have to do the resolutions in sort-of-reverse-order-except-for-the-first-two, because that would just be confusing. Also require him to pay me an entry fee sufficient to make me a millionaire, for the privilege. And also, while he's at it, to rewrite resolution number four so that it doesn't look like some kind of scathing Private-Eye-style satire of Wilson, the space aubergine's business dealings (about which I know nothing), because that wasn't my intention at all, but now when I come to look at it... well, I'm too lazy to change it, anyway.

6) Having become a millionaire, five times over, give the money away to someone else, picked at random from the world's population, because being a millionaire would be no fun at all. And besides, what would I resolve next year?