The new lunch boxes

In a homeware aisle in Lisbon, a woman fills her basket with a stack of matching lunch boxes, the kind with little compartments and clips on every side.

This time, she has decided, she will bring lunch from home every day.

She bought a similar set a year ago. Most of it is still at the back of a kitchen cupboard, one lid missing.

This is not a judgement of her. It is how nearly all of us shop for a fresh start. New trainers for the running habit. A thick notebook for the organised year. Each purchase carries a quiet suggestion that the last attempt failed for want of the right equipment.

It almost never did.

Last year's plan did not fail because of the boxes. It failed at a quarter to seven in the morning, after a late night, with a long journey ahead and nothing cooked the evening before. The boxes were never what stood between her and the habit.

And that morning is still there. The late nights, the journey and the empty fridge have not gone anywhere since the last attempt. Only the plastic is new.

It genuinely does feel different at the shelf. The colours are fresh, the resolve is fresh, and resolve always feels like a new force when you are holding it.

It is not. It is the same force that was there last time, and it lost to the same mornings.

If this attempt is going to end another way, something about those mornings has to change as well. Cooking double at dinner. Leaving earlier. A friend at work who brings food too.

Without that, the boxes are a souvenir of the plan, bought a second time.