Hi everyone,

This really has been a great conference that I’ve been attending this week down in Sandbanks. Lots of the sessions have had things that are relevant to me both on a professional and a personal level, and it’s one of these things that I’m now going to try to enlist your help with.

90% of the things we do in life are habitual. Most of them are harmless or helpful but some detract from the people that we want to be and the way that we want to live our lives. I’ve got quite a few habits that I’d like to break. Fortunately, I’ve just been given some great advice on how to go about doing it. Socialising your habits is a big part of it.

Now, I’m going to attempt to break two of my worst habits, Those are: biting my nails and drinking far too many fizzy drinks. The former I have been doing since childhood and have never, ever managed to get over. It makes my hands look horrible, causes me physical pain and is unhygienic. The latter is filling my body with sugar, aspartame and driving me towards potentially life threatening diseases like diabetes. Clearly, these are things that I cannot continue to do long term. Therefore, I would like to enlist the help of all those of you who know me or follow this website in meeting these goals.

With the nail-biting, I want to completely knock that on the head. I have included a picture (sorry!) of the state of my fingers and I am going to continue to do so every couple of days until I am content that I have beaten the habit. After a while, I may go down to once a week or less.

As far as the fizzy drinks go, I am going to limit myself to two cans every weekend for a start. For the week, I am going to completely and utterly eliminate them from my diet. I am also giving up drinking tea at work. This is a way I can cut down my dairy intake and my sugar intake in one hit. I will replace this with jasmine Green tea (which I believe is an anti-oxidant) while I am at work.

As I said, I will be posting about this as we go on in order to be accountable to you for all the promises I am making here. In return, it would be really nice if you could give me some stick if I don’t abide by what I have laid out above. Also, a bit of praise would be gratefully received if I manage to do this. These are two positive changes that I want to make in my life and I hope I can be successful in them. This can then serve as a springboard for other changes. I have been biting my nails for as long as I can remember and have always refused to believe that I can do anything about it. That ends now.

I promise that this will not be all I post about from now on. There will also be updates about the books and my usual thoughts about this, that and the other, and more poems.

Thanks for reading and following, and for your support.

Richard