I’ve been I’ve been looking through my 1988 diary, and the 10 New Year’s resolutions on the front page illustrate just how priggish an insecure teenager with bad hair, bad dress sense and no boyfriend can be.

Highlights include: 1. I will take my make-up off every night 2. I will read “good” novels 3. I will be nicer to my siblings 4. I will write letters on time 5. I will stop writing loads and loads in my diary about the boys I currently fancy.

My first act of the new year — according to the same diary — was to go out and buy Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean from WH Smiths, Birkenhead, a book that has remained unopened on my shelves ever since. My second was to ring up the boy I “currently fancied” most, on the most spurious of pretexts. His mother said he was out at a Sunday School meeting, a sentence I now suspect was a lie.

Two and a half decades on, I’m still completely in thrall to the idea of self-improvement. Every year, I make 10 New Year’s resolutions to see out the old year and see in the new — even if I now tap them into my smartphone, rather than laboriously write them out in a red-backed exercise book.

When I confessed this at a New Year’s Eve party last year, to my surprise I was greeted with howls of derision. But I like to think I’m a realist. A study of 3,000 people by the British psychologist Richard Wiseman found that 88 per cent of resolutions fail; so while nine of mine may well fall by the wayside, statistically I still have a chance of succeeding in, for example, attending a yoga class once a week.

Our tradition of yearly resolutions stretches back, some say, as far as the ancient Babylonians, who made them to avoid vengeful thunderbolts from offended deities. But it was arguably the Romans who indirectly led to the spate of Davina McCall fitness DVDs that traditionally splurge on to the market at this time of year.

When Julius Caesar changed the Roman calendar so that the new year began in January, rather than March, the two-faced deity Janus became associated with the beginning of the year. Janus could simultaneously see back into the past and look into the future — and so Romans offered their resolutions to him. It’s unlikely Janus could have ever foreseen the fact that New Year’s resolutions would become such big business.

Everywhere there are people wanting to tell us that sprouts are the new superfood or fermentation is the next big trend. And it’s always interesting to see which celebrities are keen to tell us about their resolutions. Aled Jones, the singer-turned-television presenter, apparently tries to give up biting his nails each year; Millie Mackintosh, the Made in Chelsea star, wants to lift heavier weights; while last year Hilaria, wife of Alec Baldwin, vowed to take a photograph of herself doing a different yoga pose every day.

A whole spoof website has been set up so you can generate your own Kanye West resolution in the style of the self-important rapper. Meanwhile, my personal favourite was suggested by the author Nick Bilton —a vow to stop texting while walking, after a study found that the number of people who ended up in hospital doubled between 2005 and 2010 due to mobile phone-related injuries.

Yet perhaps the most annoying thing is the rise and rise of the very public New Year’s resolution. Resolution-making becomes less of a private attempt at conquering one’s weaknesses, and more of a sponsorship opportunity for an individual quest. I’m talking about the rise of events like Dry January, in which people vow to give up drinking for 31 days in order to raise money for charities such as Alcohol Concern. No one could argue with the idea that tackling the UK’s love affair with the bottle is a good one — and interestingly, researchers found that those who did give up for a month were still drinking less nine months on. For any charity, being able to raise money is welcome.

But the constant online updates and showy selfies that bombard us in Dryathlon (Cancer Research UK’s version of Dry January) and also in Stoptober and Movember (where you quit smoking or stop shaving for a month) can become wearing. If it’s so important to you to give up drink, stop smoking or grow a moustache, what is wrong with setting up a direct debit for a charity for the year, and trying to achieve these things yourself? Perhaps my disquiet comes from the fact that no one has ever applauded — or given to charity — as a result of my yearly struggle to try to count to three before shouting at my children, lose half a stone or go to a museum once a month; or from the fact that my priorities haven’t changed over the years. But at least, to my husband’s relief, I don’t write about who I fancy in my diary any more.

— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2014