At last the new year has begun.

Yours may have started on January 1st, in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, but mine never does that. I spent that infernal night alone when a hot date with an old pal and some intoxicants fell through as she succumbed to flu (the human strain, not the avian). As the magic midnight hour approached, I was blasting the music system in an empty building, accompanying the molten exhilaration of Idlewild's 2002 near-miss, 'You Held The World In Your Arms Tonight', with an abstemious bottle of Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon. As the clock ticked down, I lurched into the bedroom in time for Jools Holland's countdown, immediately after which my dear friend Marc Almond, recovered from a motorbike disaster and a hole in his skull, performed a jumpin', big-band version of his 25-year-old mega-hit, 'Tainted Love'. After that, it was pretty much downhill.

The last weekend of January brought the Chinese new year, a chance to 'kung-hay-fat-tsoi' with my pride-and-joy and start all over again, if only he hadn't been in Hong Kong for a family reunion. So I nibbled wistfully on a moon cake (the kind with a bit of yolk-yellow peanutty gunge in the middle, to reflect the bitterness of solitude), and kept watching the skies. The Daily Mail astrologer Jonathan Cainer had advised me I was about to have the Best Year of My Life, and although I pretty much think astrology is horse-poo, I am advised that a word from him counts as good authority. As the weeks have crawled by, however, with each fresh provocation jostling the last for pre-eminence, I feel an urge to place a call to Mr Cainer and ask him to define 'best'.

Last weekend though, the hoped-for relief arrived, not quite on the scale of Mafeking to the disinterested observer, I grant, but good enough for me. My neighbour has taken down her Christmas decorations.

Is there any sicklier token of time's relentless tread than festive adornments that have outstayed their occasion? Slanting winter sun picked out the purple baubles on the massive tree, the tinsel was way past the twinkling stage and had begun to to pant feebly for want of being thrown into a box in the wardrobe, while the Christmas stocking hung at the window was a daily affront to passers-by, grim memento of the gifts they didn't receive - and even grimmer perhaps of the ones they did. I note though that, even while the fairy-lights have gone, the tree itself still stands. Denuded, but not quite stripped of its dignity, it is possibly now serving the place of a token of springtime renewal, the reinvestiture of hope, a cheery defiance of the bare plane trees across the street. I can't bear to ask.

At any rate, there is at last the feeling of knuckling down to the year ahead, or the eleven-twelfths of it that remain to us. As each day brings bracing new challenges, it is at least a comfort to know that those around me have now joined me in an awareness that the game - like we it or no - is on.