Slipping into the New Year should be like slipping into something comfortable and reassuring. casting off your work clothes after a hard day’s grind and slipping on your old jeans. Collapsing into your favourite battered old armchair after a good dinner and falling asleep in front of the TV. Nothing like a boring, reassuring and low key start to the New Year. What is so new about it anyway? I’m still firmly in last year – writing 2013 on all my cheques – staring at last year’s calendar looking desperately for the 34th of December. What if January never comes? I’ll never have to go back to work and it will be “after Christmas” for evermore and even longer than that.

If the New Year never came? But the New Year always comes, and in the man made regulation of time, we notch up yet another number and we give it some magical significance. A change of year – a fresh start – like a new, clean page in the notebook of life. Time to write a new and better chapter in our lives because of a number shift. For sure we went from 2013 to 2014 in the same way that we went from Tuesday to Wednesday.

Call me a New Year cynic. Any day, not just New Year’s Day, is a good time for a fresh start. Perhaps New Year’s day is the worst. Hungover, fuzzy, lost in the fume and fug of the  night before. The Morning after is still the night before and nothing is ever fresh. If anything it is all just a tough too stale.

So, an end to these ramblings, and whether you are reading this on December 34th, 35th or 36th, I would wish you all a comfortable slip back into your routine. If life was like an old pair of jeans or an armchair of advancing years, well worn to your form and habits, then, may your jeans last a few more rips and a few more holes. May the springs in your armchair support you yet anoher year, in spite of post festive weight differentials. Were I to have a New Year’s resolution, it might be a new armchair, though I like my old one so much, and I can’t be bothered with th ahssle of buying a new one, then sliding and farting around in it until it feels just as comfortable as the old one.

I guess by this that I am just trying to wish a comfortable 2014.