At the beginning of the month my wife and I had our traditional dispute about the official start date of Dry January.

“January 1st is a public holiday,” I said, as she watched me open a beer. “It doesn’t count.”

“Today is the 4th,” she said.

“And a Sunday,” I said. “Dry January begins on the next available business day.”

“The 2nd was a business day,” she said.

“Not in Scotland,” I said.

The oldest one walked in.

“Do you want some of this?” I said, holding up the beer bottle.

“I’m doing Dry January,” he said.

“When did you start?” my wife said.

“At midnight on the 1st,” he said. “That’s when it starts.”

The dates don’t matter, I wanted to say. It’s the 31-day stretch that’s important – you could do it whenever. But of course this is wrong: we reserve these privations for January on purpose. Despite, or perhaps because of the month’s prodigious capacity to disappoint, we go out of our way to make January hard on ourselves.

It starts with the tremendously misleading idea of a clean slate. It always takes me until around the 10th to realise that all the missed deadlines and unfulfilled obligations of December have simply followed me into January, that no one I’m indebted to is thinking in terms of fresh starts. By the 15th, I have accepted that I’m beginning 2026 further behind than I ended 2025, and that this cycle will continue until I die.

As my wife and I arrive home from walking the dog on a cold and thankless morning, something terrible occurs to me as I Iook up our road.

“Oh shit,” I say. “It’s bins.”

Like every January, bin collection has moved to a staggered timetable. And like every January, I have failed to adapt.

My wife watches as I drag the rubbish bin down the front path to the pavement, shaking her head.

“What?” I say. “Maybe the bin men are also late.”

“The bin men,” she says, “have been.”

Any toilet repair must be effected while standing on a ladder, and conducted largely by feel. It’s marginally preferable to doing my taxes

The fridge is full of food with sell-by dates from either side of Twelfth Night. Some of it we eat anyway, on the basis that fresh food is for people who have their shit together. The rest of it stays put for now, because there is no room in the bins.

In some ways I like the despairing nature of January, which obliges you to find joy where you can. That’s what I’m thinking as I sit in my office shed watching a snowflake the size of a pigeon feather waft to earth outside, instead of doing my taxes. My wife crosses the garden and opens the door.

“The loo won’t flush,” she says.

“That’s January for you,” I say.

“Nothing happens when you pull,” she says. “It’s come off inside again.”

“Yeah, what can you do?” I say.

“Fix it,” she says.

I know there is no fixing these things: our high-mounted, chain-pull toilet cistern has a certain period charm which in no way offsets its tendency towards malfunction. The fulcrum on which the chain-pull mechanism operates relies on a single rivet, a rivet that has long since lost its proud edges, so that it eventually works its way loose and falls into the cistern – on average every 40 days.

To complicate things, any repair must be effected while standing on a ladder, and conducted largely by feel. It would be fair to say that I’ve spent some of my lowest moments in that position, but it’s marginally preferable to doing my taxes, so I fetch the ladder and carry it upstairs.

I am not prone to epiphanies – especially in January – but I have one right there on that ladder, with my left arm up to the elbow in cistern water, fishing around for that stupid rivet. I wish I could say it had something to do with the nature of existence, or the function of beauty in an otherwise bleak and unforgiving world.

“I realised that if I could find a bit of stout galvanised wire, the kind you use for trellises, I could probably thread it through the rivet.”

“I see,” my wife says.

We’re standing in the kitchen, an hour later.

“And I did find some, and it did fit through,” I say. “Then I bent both ends down with a pair of pliers, so now the rivet can’t work loose.”

“Well done,” she says.

“You don’t understand,” I say. “This is a permanent solution. Our lives are about to change.”

“Is it bins tomorrow?” she says, looking in the fridge. “I think it’s bins.”