THERE’S a good gag that’s always stuck with me from an otherwise fairly forgettable comedy film.

A secondary character approaches the lead, who’s reading the Dickens classic, Great Expectations.

“Is it any good?” asks the bit-player.

“It’s not all I’d hoped for,” the lead deadpans in return.

As we move into the new year, we’re naturally filled with hope for the coming months, and while hope is important, there’s always the very real possibility we’ll be setting ourselves up to fail.

How many of us, for example, have broken Dry January?

How long did that New Year’s diet last?

We’re almost three weeks into 2018, how’s that new gym regime going?

It’s natural to want what’s best for ourselves, and without planning for the best it’s nigh-on impossible to achieve it (unless you’re blessed with blind luck or being born into some sort of rich and powerful dynasty), but perhaps it’s important not to kid ourselves.

“A pessimist is never disappointed,” is a phrase I’ve used countless times when being accused of negativity.

Now, while I don’t recommend being downbeat all the time - it’s bloody exhausting and not very rewarding - I expect the opposite is also true.

The ability of naturally upbeat and optimistic people to remain happy in the face of everything the world has to offer fascinates me, though it’s sometimes a tightrope between whether their positive attitude improves my own mood or forces me deeper into the trenches of mild misanthropy.

Either way, it’s an admirable trait in others, and I believe it should be encouraged, even if it’s not something I plan to try.

The main reason I won’t attempt all-out optimism is because experience suggests that as soon as something goes wrong I’ll give myself a metaphorical kicking for thinking my mental attitude would change anything, and I could do without that.

By setting myself up to fail with a resolution as big as changing my entire outlook to boundless positivity, all I’d do is feel worse when I had a setback.

Instead, perhaps I’ll aim for mild positivity with a bedrock of realism - only drink at weekends, eat better but allow myself a treat from time to time, and get some exercise whenever I can but not beat myself up if I’m not in the gym three times a week.

With this in mind, I’ll try to stop getting excited every time I read a tweet that suggests a major change to the world is just days away.

In the last year or so, I’ve lost count of the amount of times Twitter has cried ‘THIS IS IT!’ over the latest smoking gun that’s going to bring down the clown in the White House, only for it to come to absolutely nothing, some throwaway story that runs for less than 24 hours.

It took more than two years for Watergate to bring down Nixon, so I suppose patience is as valuable a virtue as positivity.

Also, they say good things come to those who wait, and if it ever happens to the tiny-handed narcissist, it’ll be a fascinating watch.

At the end of 2016, I wrote about my hopes for 2017.

They basically ran to ‘I hope no more of my heroes die unexpectedly’, ‘whether I agree with it or not, I hope the country is somehow united by the triggering of Article 50’, and ‘I hope fewer people have to rely on foodbanks and the world becomes a little bit nicer’.

Now, I think it’s pretty clear that these things haven’t happened (although I’ve still got a few heroes left).

However, as simple as it sounds, I think 2018’s expectations are simply as low as ‘maybe everything will be fine if the world doesn’t explode’.

Whether you (or I), like it or not, I’m contractually obligated to write a few more columns between now and 2019, so unless the world explodes I’ll be back again next month.

Just keep your expectations low, yeah?