What the doctor ordered

I don’t know whose idea it was to put New Year at the beginning of January, but it seems like an odd one. Why not begin each new year on, let’s say, the first of April or May? It might bring at least a dash of new dawn-ishness — a flicker of sunlight, scampering clouds, hello birds and a hey nonny no — to New Year’s Day. There’s no spring in the step of 1 January. She has neither the time nor the inclination for good cheer. She is as tired, headachey and whey-faced as if she had stayed up half the night dancing to ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’ with 31 December and had woken to find him — Oh God! Not again! — snoring in her bed.

On New Year’s Day — a handover day, rudderless and ungoverned — we don’t want ‘new’, we want familiar: tea, toast, television, baked potatoes and the threat of work in the morning.