Filed by Alastair Graham, in the absence of Mutha...

It has been said that if life were measured by accomplishments, most of us would die in infancy. This is not true of my inner circle, whose bewildering array of talents produce hard, sleek, elegant achievements with alarming frequency.

Like novels. Beautifully crafted, funny, much-loved novels at a rate of about one every eighteen months. I have been known to put off hanging my washing out for comparable periods. Or languages. I have a friend who is able to travel from Dortmund to Darwin by whichever route he chooses and be perfectly well understood - tracts of Lincolnshire notwithstanding. Meanwhile, my bookshelves tell their own story of false starts and stalled ambition: How to Run Your Own Business (heavily thumbed); Drawing & Painting Portraits (exercises skipped); Investing for Success (draught excluder special).

And so it was that I woke up in Sydney on New Year’s Day and knew what I had to do. After checking for big spiders under the bed. In 2006, I would set a new world record for… something. Anything. Attempting a world record requires endurance of the kind of wall-to-wall bureaucracy that makes Kafka’s Castle look like a short queue at the post office but this morning I awoke as the new Guinness World Record holder for ‘Apple Bobbing in a Minute’. Seventeen, if you're interested. A small victory, granted, but a step-change from last year’s resolution, which was ‘eat more butter’.

“Every great achievement is the victory of a flaming heart”, said Ralph Waldo Emerson, who preceded peppermint Rennie by a number of years.