Happy New Year - mind the strange smell and watch out for the pins. Also cellophane.

Welcome to the new series of digits! Apparently this is the first time in..ooh, ages, that all the four digits have been different - amazing, eh?  I have to admit that I'm not good with numbers, to the extent that when I read out a phone number I'm fine up to about three digits in, and then I just start making mouth noises.."oh one nine oh flap budget, twibble argh drool crumb neap" is my son's phone number, apparently.

Anyway.  This new series of numbers is supposed to herald a new beginning! Not just of the year, but we are popularly called upon to make a new start on things when a new year rolls around.  Fortunately I've got wise to the whole thing now, and I can spot a new year coming from months away.  Around about October I start planning new things, getting them in order and lined up ready to go, so that, in January, I can start doing them - this is a cunning plan that you may wish to adopt for your own use.  It fulfills that need to begin new things without them actually being so new that they are alarming and shiny and all stiff and crackly as new things tend to be.  Also full of pins, or is that just shirts?

It looked far too new.  Honestly.  Needed...testing, yes, testing, to check that it was going to be all right.

I do the same thing with years.  I've been breaking in 2013 since last August. New things tend to have a distressing tendency to be a bit strange - they smell weird for a start, normally of cellophane and glue, if you don't believe me just go and have a sniff of that thing you got for Christmas that you haven't got round to unpacking yet.  Go on, I'll wait.

See?  Cellophane and glue.  And sort of stiff round the edges.  So, new years need a bit of wearing in, roughening up, to make them nice and floppy and user-friendly.  I'm sure that 2013, once we get a bit of wear on it, will be just fine.  By the time we can bend it in half we will be perfectly comfortable using it, unfortunately this tends to happen around about November, so you may wish to adopt my habit of starting to use a new year in the summer months of the previous year, you know, at a time when it's not absolutely essential that you use it, so that you can just use it occasionally.  Maybe, say, one day a week.  Then you can begin to use it more and more often, so that, by the time you have to use it, it's nice and broken in and comfortable.

Hang on.  I might be thinking about slippers.  Oh well, never mind, the same principle holds true, if you save things for 'best' you only have yourself to blame if they are uncomfortable when you actually come to use them.  In fact, I'm going to start breaking in several years at once now, just so that they've lost that 'new' smell by the time I need them, so...

HAPPY 2013, 2014 and 2015, everyone!  And if you like, you can start unpacking 2016 and giving it a bit of a wiggle to loosen its digits - you'll thank me in the end...