House Rules: on Loving January

January gets a bad press. Back to work, back to school, back to reality, and back to being vaguely resentful that you didn’t book a holiday somewhere sunny in what is generally acknowledged to be the darkest month of the year.

January contains what Cliff Arnall, a former tutor at Cardiff University, calculated to be the gloomiest day of all: Blue Monday. Using an equation with factors including weather, debt, salary, time since Christmas, time since failing our New Year’s resolutions, motivational levels, and – my favourite “the feeling of a need to take action”, he added just enough maths to make the third Monday of January plausibly appear to be the grottiest 24 hours of the year.

Done right, January can be glorious. The year is young and fresh. You haven’t had a chance to disappoint yourself yet, and even if you have, you can always just call it a shaky start, and have another go at goodness. That’s not the kind of thing you can get away with in June.

Arnall’s equation turned out to have been instigated by a PR agency, the idea being that if we’re all told we’re miserable we might be persuaded to spend money on cheering ourselves up. If that’s your preferred route, the sales are on, so your home can, relatively inexpensively, become a cosy den of scatter cushions and luxurious throws. You’re bound to have an oversupply of candles after Christmas – they are the present that says “I had no idea what to get you, but I did want to give you something that wouldn’t offend”. And you’re probably, post Festivities, coming down with box sets and books to while away the evenings most contentedly.

Then, take those occasional sparkling days when the air is crisp, and it’s all so unexpected that it feels like a wonderful present. Add the feeling of slowly but surely feeling better and healthier as those resolutions, however frail, kick in. Stir it all about with the knowledge that the days are (very slowly) getting longer, plus the thought that even if you do utterly fail in keeping any of your resolutions, for the brief time you made them you were indeed a better person. January – what’s not to love?