HOW are the New Year’s resolutions going? Have you been to the gym yet? Mine was to not make any resolutions at all and then, I’ll be damned, I found myself going vegan by accident.

It happened last Friday after I realised that all of my meals that day had been totally bereft of animals and their products. I’m a weak-willed semi-veggie at the best of times but this seemed to be a sign. If you can eat vegan meals without even meaning to, how hard can it be?

Well, we shall see. People opt for a plant-based diet for many reasons, and they are usually motivated, committed and sometimes downright passionate about it. Look at Morrissey (who is apparently a militant vegetarian rather than an out-and-out vegan): he bans burgers at his concerts and compares meat-eaters with Nazis.

OK, Mozza is extreme. He even had doormen confiscating mints at a gig my husband went to. I don’t know if this was animal-related; it could have been a dislike of fans wafting minty breath at him. He’s a sensitive type.

My point is that people tend to go meat-free for a reason, as I originally did when I was 17 and read Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation. I’ve lapsed and dillied and dallied since then, justifying fish and later chicken (free-range, of course) and occasionally nibbling a bit of bacon when I was making the family a breakfast buttie.

With zero credibility as a vegetarian, it will be interesting to find out whether falling into veganism will stick. And, no, I haven’t managed to stay entirely pure – there’s yoghurt to finish up in the fridge and the husband keeps forgetting and putting milk in my tea – but so far, it’s been manageable. Not eating cheese is a drag, and I can’t imagine chips without fish: I may yet have Fantasia-inspired dreams about pirouetting battered haddocks.

Still, I’m looking forward to the health benefits. A friend of mine, who is also in her fifties, went vegan last year and she looks youthful and radiant. It’s an incentive, to be sure – half of Hollywood seems to have taken the meat-free, dairy-free, egg-free vow for health reasons – but spotlighting faddy celebs (Jay Z and Beyoncé did it for three weeks) doesn’t get over the important messages.

Excluding animal exploitation and cruelty is the original, defining purpose of veganism and remains its guiding tenet, but increasingly a plant-based diet is seen as a crucial to global sustainability and food security because it is so much more efficient in terms of land use, energy and resources.

Bill Gates and Al Gore have converted for this reason, although I’m guessing they’d be happy to acquire Beyoncé’s ‘newly toned tummy’ into the bargain. Hell, I know I would, and if that’s the happy by-product of reducing greenhouse gases from burping cows – which produce so much global-warming methane that they double the carbon emissions of farming them – then I’m up for it. I’ll keep you posted.

 

• IN THE MEANTIME there is an elephant in the (news)room, and I’m pretty sure it’s not the same one that Sherlock nearly blabbed to guests at John ‘H’ Watson’s wedding reception on Sunday. My elephant is wet, cold and miserable and is nudging me with her frozen trunk, though her tail is looking oddly frizzled.

I think she wants to ask why, when every state in the US is experiencing sub-zero temperatures and every county in the UK has flood warnings and people are shopping by boat in southern England and Australia is in the grip of another heatwave so devastating that 100,000 bats are dropping dead from the sky, people are not joining up the dots.

It can’t be said often enough: there is a pattern here. The weather is weird and it’s getting weirder (yes, ‘global weirding’ is a thing now). What we’re experiencing may seem abnormal, but the evidence and the models all point to the fact that extreme weather is the new normal.

I say that but, psychologically, I don’t want to believe it. It is hard to accept that the life we know will really, substantially change. And that it will not change back. It was when I saw vast tracts of Glouc-estershire under water on the news and the Thames in Oxford swallowing up land (and, tragically, people) that I realised: this really is it.

Step forward, Nellie. The people can see you now.