If you’ve ever been the victim of low mood, you may know that mornings are often the hardest time of day.

In my experience this is because I can’t control my thoughts before my brain emerges for its first breath of air.

Once the consciousness is in control, one has more opportunity to pull oneself together, yank one’s socks in a Northerly direction, buck oneself up, give oneself a thorough talking to and all the other strategies that have been so unfashionable since psychotherapy walked the earth and upper lips became soft, sensitive and soggy… and yet can prove so surprisingly effective.

(Ok, ok, this robust approach can sometimes be very dangerous and destructive when administered by others. Please, no hate mail on this first day of a new beginning.)

In addition and coincidentally, I was brought up with no radiator in my bedroom and all my father’s theories about open windows and fresh air.

Serena says our bedroom is kept several degrees colder than outside even when it’s snowing and you’d be able to see your breath form icicles if it hadn’t already been knocked out of you by the shock of entering the room. (And that’s even though her house is saving the polar bears all on its own, she is so passionately committed to cooling the planet.)

Which temperature is very good for one’s health – mental, physical and soporific – but it does means you start the day with your very first challenge: getting out from under at least eight inches of duck down.

So there I was, opening my eyes around the same time the sun peeped out from under its own dark duvet, and feeling my heart sink.

Day. Life. S***.

Sigh.

Even my bedside radio broke around Christmas time.

Wait a minute… Christmas time. Christmas… We’ve done that one. It was actually rather fun. If briefer than usual.

Then Boxing Day. That too. We even had the kitchen tidy by mid-morning because the house was strangely empty of the usual stragglers from the day before and early arrivals for the afternoon’s hockey match in the park.

What came next?

New Year’s Eve, wasn’t it?

I even managed that.

Often I find bed and a good book (or companion; or preferably both) very considerably more attractive than some pointless countdown and tuneless drunken crowd sing-a-song of Auld Langs. But last night we all watched a moderately decent film together; and half way through, Rose and I ran upstairs to watch the fireworks, yammering and bursting 200º around the horizon from the top balcony. Bam. Pow. Wow.

So… if we’ve done that one… oh glory!

It is New Year’s Day. I feel like Scrooge on Christmas morning.

We’ve left 2020 behind us.

Let’s admit it.

I know this is a blog about optimism but true hopefulness springs from honesty, as I believe I’ve said before.

Last year was b***** awful.

I mean, it was, wasn’t it? I’m not imagining this?

Ok, I have one close friend – our gorgeous cleaner – who found a new man in 2020. She smiles at some of the memories.

Everyone else – everyone else – has had a truly s*** year.

If I were the teatowel-caption-writing-entrepreneur-type, I would patent the logo, Keep Calm and Blame the Virus.

I know we can’t blame Covid-19 for all of it:

One of my bestest friends lost her sister.

I lost my father.

Our daughter remains extremely ill.

But we can certainly blame the virus for the unemployment, redundancy, loss of income, loneliness, stolen opportunities and most widespread depression I for one have certainly ever witnessed.

And that rubbish, awful, lousy year is over.

Good riddance.

D-Day.

I’ve heard preachers – or perhaps, to be honest, just Shaun – compare Christian life-before-death with life-after-D-Day. We know the victory has, essentially, been won. But there will still be casualties, hardship, stuff to get through.

The virus has, essentially, been beaten.

A previous New Year, 2009, was pretty awful for us. A lot worse than this. Shaun was suffering a devastating breakdown. Naturally, therefore, his cut-throat employer took the opportunity to trump up frankly staggeringly unbelievable charges against him. Which he was too ill to realise were fake. We had no future elsewhere. If we didn’t fight – and Shaun couldn’t; and more to the point didn’t win – we faced certain homelessness again… and this time permanent.

It was not a good New Year for us.

And yet 2009 turned into one of the best years of our lives.

The flowers you see here are from the all-year-round rose-and-clemetis garden I planted in my mother’s memory after that year. Picked this morning as I let the hens out in their new lockdown-secure run from their new hen house. After I emerged from a quietly sleeping house into an entirely sleeping world.

True, I lost my dear mother in that year of 2009: a loss I will never get over. Not this side of Heaven.

But it was also the year we turned the tables on Shaun’s employer and the default responsibility of generations and housed my parents, before my mother left us, to care for them and give them a glorious old age.

What a year!

So roll on 2021.

It can only get better…