New Year’s Eve is the most irritating night of the year. Any other time, I can take pleasure in people’s celebrations. But by the time that the spiritless, drunken sounds of revellers screeching ‘Happy New Year’ reaches my tired ears, I’m already bored. Bored with the hoi polloi’s banal questioning of my plans for the New Year.

I would love to say I was going dolphin diving in the moonlight at Bondi, or to a bonfire-lit seafood feast in Thailand with the boyfriend I’m mad about. Without those best-laid plans, you will end up like me, attending at least one depressing nightclub and one chaotic house party. But why pick a particular day for this purpose anyway?

It’s a stark irony of the Western calendar that the odometer turns over smack in the middle of winter – the one time of the year when most people can’t rouse themselves to clean their bathrooms, much less make an ambitious, life-changing, behavioural U-turn. Every day – and every moment of every day – is the start of a new year, because it is always exactly one year away from a corresponding moment one year previously.

You may be reading this in the style of an alcoholic walrus, bloated by Christmas ‘spirits’ and with a waxy, grey complexion. But cheer up! It’s New Year’s resolution time! Yes it’s that time of year where one picks oneself up of the couch, pops the last Xmas Quality Street betwixt one’s red wine-stained lips, and muses upon what you could do to change your life in 2010. Well… you could go to the gym more?

If you, like me, recently caught sight of yourself in a three way mirror in M&S (when I was buying support tights!) and screamed in horror when you realised what guys standing behind you see, then maybe it is time to dust off your trainers. Generally after the trauma of Christmas, whether you’ve frantically looked for potential baby daddies under wilting mistletoe, or watched your children unwrap their gifts with ill-concealed disgust, the act of welcoming the New Year is so debilitating that it’s all you’ll be able to do to haul ass into 2010.

So let’s forget about your New Year resolutions for a moment, we can have another crack when the daffodils start poking through. The Welsh will probably object, but how about hijacking St David’s Day and making it Resolution Day?