LOOK at what you hold today. Turn this thing over, lift it to the light, test its weight, the shape unknowable and yet the same. Grasp this lump of newness, sigh and then utter a magical incantation suitable to such a moment: “Bloody hell, another one.”

New Year’s Day is the last outpost of Christmas, minus needles and wrapped in tired tinsel; or if you prefer it is a clean signpost shoved into the fresh springy earth and pointing God only knows where.

This day has much in common with the often-quoted glass, the one either half-full or half-empty, depending on the holder. A day half full of sparkling hope, or a day half-empty with last night’s fizz gone flat. A day to look backwards and forwards at the same time, if you can do such a thing without raising a stiff neck or a headache.

The optimist thinks: “This one will be better”, while his gloomy companion the pessimist casts a worrying glance at the horizon and shudders. And the columnist writing two days before the day in question ties himself in jokey half-poetic knots while seeking something that fits the moment.

You will get no predictions from me, other than to say that good and bad things will happen in a way that is predictable and unforeseeable at the same time. That’s the way it usually goes.

In truth this is just another day, quieter than some, but a day all the same; a good day in that normal life is allowed to resume. Christmas is truly done with, if not yet paid for, and we can all get on with doing what we do best, which is bumbling along, rolling one day into another until a week has been assembled, and so on.

In skimming the internet for quotes suitable to this day, I quite liked this one from the writer Neil Gaiman, whom I have never read, but here goes: “I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something…”

After that it all goes a bit self-improvement-y for my taste, but never mind, and it is true that many good things are made of mistakes.

And if this week’s column isn’t to your taste, mark it down as one of those slip-ups. I could always have written: “Happy New Year and all that” and left it at that.

 

• I HAVE seen a few Christmases, but I have never seen the Queen’s traditional message. Or at least not that I remember. I know the form, thanks to excerpts on the TV news, but have yet to sample the full version.

Others certainly do watch, and this year the Queen’s message, shown on BBC1 and ITV, drew in 7.8 million viewers, making it the most watched programme on Christmas Day.

Do people watch out of love for royalty, habit or a bit of both? Do even non-royalists swallow it down, much as plum pudding sceptics do the Christmas pud?

The Queen drew two million more viewers than Doctor Who, but only a smidgen more than Mrs Brown’s Boys. Roughly the same amount of people tuned in to Her Majesty as to an Irish comedian pretending to be a foul-mouthed matriarch. What sort of a country does that make us, caught between Mrs Windsor and Mrs Brown?

The other programmes topping the Christmas Day ratings mostly belonged to the BBC (EastEnders, Strictly Come Dancing, Call The Midwife, Miranda and Doctor Who, while ITV held up its end with Coronation Street, Downton Abbey and Emmerdale).

Doctor Who was down two million viewers on last year, when Matt Smith did his farewell turn. Some traditions I do adhere to and the Christmas Day special is one of those. A good one this year, I thought – especially the dreams-within-dreams plot and a spot of teasing over whether or not Jenna Coleman was staying or going. She’s staying, thankfully.

My own favourite programme over the holiday wasn’t on Christmas Day. I’ve no notion how many people watched Victoria Wood’s musical That Day We Sang, but they should have done, because it was funny, poignant and a perfect bit of Christmas TV, although it wasn’t even about Christmas.