Back to life, back to reality

Tomorrow morning I will be getting up at ohmygod o'clock and preparing myself for a working day. This is most unfair.

It's that time of year again when the working masses, each of whom has spent the previous week or so on the sofa gaining girth like a giant redwood, remember that they have a day job and they'd better get out and do it.

By all accounts, this is one of the most depressing weeks of the year. It's to do with the shock return to the drudgery of work, allied to the end of the festive period and the arrival of credit card bills bearing numbers previously only encountered by NASA. Apparently it's enough to push otherwise stable people over the edge. I'm hardly surprised.

The Christmas and New Year period does bring around some odd behaviour itself, though, doesn't it? At what other time of the year do we think it's reasonable to answer in the affirmative to the question: "Ooh, shall we open some beers?" at 2.00pm? And we'll stay up until three in the morning to watch films unnecessarily. I'm quite certain that normal people in the middle of June, for instance, don't find it necessary to polish off a one-pound box of Quality Street while watching a broadcast of the Italian Job - a film that they already own on DVD.

The original one. The one about a Job, set in Italy. Just in case you wondered.

For 50 weeks of the year, it is considered wrong to indulge in this type of behaviour. But at the end of December we all enter this collective stupor. It doesn't even matter if you try to be productive; I went to work for three days last week, but it was that 'between-Christmas-and-New-Year' hinterland. There was the European Crap Food Mountain in the office, as all of us tried to empty our homes of the stuff. We had 36 mince pies to get through, a hundredweight of dry roasted peanuts, yet only two of us were in to consume it. The collection of Pringles tubes looked like a Soviet missile base seen from a distance. And I was suffering. Quite frankly I was operating strictly on autopilot for activities such as conversation. And breathing.

And so at the beginning of January we try to drag ourselves out of it all again. We attempt to shake off the group madness that has afflicted us all. We emerge, grizzly bear-like, from our caves, wriggle off a few sausage roll crumbs from our coats, and regain a sense of normality. Think of me tomorrow morning. Christ on a bendy bus, it's going to be hard.