Champagne, and lots of it. For breakfast. While sorting your closet.

Old Lady Swimming – The best, sure-fire mood enhancer ever, short of champagne. 1) Put on your swimsuit 2) Apply lipstick and put your hair up 3) Go to a HEATED INDOOR POOL, most hotels have a day-pass 4) Put on coconut-scented lotion 5) go gingerly into the pool and paddle around. DO NOT TRY TO EXERCISE. Paddle. Kick a little. Don’t get your hair wet, just float. Daydream. [If you have kids – hire a babysitter to watch over them (encouraging the babysitter to make the kids play strenuously). Pretend they are not your children.] 6) Go home and have a completely inappropriate dinner: popcorn, pancakes, and three servings of cranberry sauce with mini-marshmallows. [And yes, keep the babysitter! Let her wrangle with the rug-rats for dinner and bedtime, tell everyone you have a family emergency and hie off to the den to watch South Pacific or Cocktail] An aperitif or eight, toddle off to bed and wake up the next morning with a renewed faith in humanity.

Write a letter to at least one person who has been a complete jerk to you in 2019. You can decided later whether or not to send it.

Send flowers to an angsty teenager – no one expects presents on January 5th – no one expects flowers. Let them scoff and stomp and when no one is around, they will approach the bouquet warily, take a deep sniff and…. hmmm, was that the glimmer of content? Yes, it was.

Carefully wrap any of your Christmas decorations that you don’t like using Christmas paper that you don’t like to give to people you don’t like for Christmas next year. Win – win- win.

Pay someone to clean your car (angsty teenagers are good for this, know they will keep any money they find, but that’s fair play).

Don’t make any resolutions – and if you made any (despite the fact that I told you not to!) ignore them! Bury that list full fathom five. Or turn the paper into a paper airplane and shoot it towards someone who is being a pill (yet, again, angsty teenagers are good for this).  And remember:

The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year. John Foster Dulles

The wildfires in Australia are horrific – there are political battles to fight – things can look hopeless – do what you can for the cause you believe in and say to yourself:

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. A.W. Streane

More champagne. It’s going to be fine, Darling.