New Year resolutions are probably a good thing if they take the form of a path to walk — direction of travel — rather than hard-and-fast rules. Rigidity is brittle, it shatters, its legacy is disillusionment. But a direction of travel imposes less demanding expectations because it is not so specific.
With that in mind, here are the paths I choose to travel in 2026.
The first is to do with food shopping. My heart is troubled for the farmers in our country. Just yesterday I sat and watched a video clip of an MP raising with our Prime Minister just how grave is the situation for family farms. The waiving of Inheritance Tax for farms has enabled them to be passed down through generations; typically farmers make small profits but the land they own is a significant capital asset. The new regulation coming into effect in April 2026 could wipe out our food security in a generation. The MP told the Prime Minister how, in her constituency alone, quite a number (I think she said eleven) of elderly farmers, or farmers living with terminal illness, are in a predicament. If they die before April 5th, their children can inherit the farm. If they die after April 6th, Inheritance Tax will apply and their children will be forced to sell the farm. To whom, I wonder. Probably developers of land for housing or leisure facilities or "Green" industry. So they are considering committing suicide to protect the heritage of their farming families. The Prime Minister agreed that this was likely so. That's all. He had no plan to reconsider.
Because our government has bought into the Net Zero philosophy and the febrile Green religion that has seized the public mind, people have been sold the legend that meat and dairy must be minimised in our diet. It seems they do not know the crucial rôle played by large herbivores in protecting and regenerating the land. If farming were entirely arable — tilled earth agriculture — the end result would be a dust bowl. The heart of farming should be fields and hedgerows full of biodiversity, for mob-grazed sheep and cows. There should be plenty of forest cover, managed so as to include pigs and chickens on a sufficiently occasional or widespread basis. Our farm animals should have freedom to roam and fulfil the natural social patterns of their lives, the ruminants raised on pasture and the mono-gastric animals fed a varied and wholesome diet — not soy and other cash crops and the leftovers of ultra-processed junk.
It may be that one day I will be able to eat other than just meat and dairy. But that might not be possible. As things are at present it would likely cost me my colon. I contemplate with dread and a level of despair our ruling élites' brave new world where the ordinary people's diet is built on grain and seed oils and sugar, with a few vegetables and a only a grudging ration of butter and meat allowed. Already the public is being softened up in this direction, with the EATLancet dietary programme influencing the public mind to accept that as a way forward. If that happens, we can look forward to ever increasing reliance on food as a factory product, on agro-chemicals and hydroponics and laboratory grown "meat", with an outcome of even greater manifestation of metabolic illness than we see at present.
Where the large herbivores still have permission to even exist, the eagerness to cull them and inject them with mRNA gene cocktails and Bovaer digestive disruptors will undermine their health and the budgets of the farms.
What to do? What to do?
This one small thing I will resolve for 2026: I will buy my food (which is all meat and dairy) from the small local farm shops, so the money goes to the actual farmers in the place where I live; or from English farmers with especially regenerative practice, who are kind to their animals. Not to agribusiness. Not to the shareholders of the supermarkets. Not to halal practitioners. To the farmers whose animals are free to live on pasture and eat wholesome and natural food, who produce meat slaughtered humanely in small local abattoirs so the animals don't have long stressful journeys packed into lorries.
So that will be one direction of travel.
Then the second thing I want to do is make 2026 what is sometimes called a low-buy year. I think if I try for a no-buy year I will set myself up for failure. I want to be able to buy books. Other than that, I think I probably already have everything I need, but there's no doubt in my mind that before I've gone many steps down the path I'll think of something I simply can't live without. But my daily life is uneventful and routine with no important functions to attend, that might have a special dress code. I like making clothes, but I have seven skirts now, and a (small) drawer full of hats — that's surely enough? I have shirts for the summer and warm sweaters for the winter, three pairs of sandals and three pairs of boots. That's plenty, isn't it?
The third thing I have in mind for 2026 is to find a church community that feels like home, that can accept me for who I am and make me welcome. Not politics dressed up as church, and not with a lazy pastor who can't be bothered to shepherd the flock or dig deep to find the word of God for the people. I don't even know where to look.
So, those are my three signposts for the journey through next year:
- Meat and dairy from local famers
- Low-buy and keep my possessions down to a minimum
- A church family to authentically contribute and belong
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