Better believe it — this is gonna be your year

SO that’s it then. All over. All you have to look forward to now is watching your New Year’s resolutions float off and pop like empty bubbles, one by one, so that in another few weeks you will be paying for a gym membership that will remain unused until you figure out a way of legally extricating yourself from it without incurring a mortgage-sized penalty.

Those juice detox books will be heaped together and used as a handy step to reach the biscuit cupboard, and your Introduction to Mandarin will remain ... unintroduced.

But maybe that’s terribly cynical. Maybe this year really will be the one where you become the person you have always believed yourself to be.

This could be the year to put all the awful relationships with their protracted car crash endings behind you. Never mind the endless, bitter divorce, or the loss of the house and the savings account and the car and the dog. This will be your year.

All you need is a decent internet profile – this is the time of year where not only do all the meetings of 12 Step programmes fill up with desperate newcomers, but when all the internet dating sites fill up with desperate single people, frantically trying to find someone with whom to reduce the winter heating bill. It could be you.!

There’s no reason to believe that just because all your previous internet dates were with psychopaths and geography teachers that this year will not be totally and unrecognisably different — this will be the year you meet the rich talented clever funny one who works for a charity for orphaned polar bear cubs, and is just dying to have babies with you. Believe it.

You just have got to be really optimistic — what are Januarys for, if not wild, untethered optimism? Never mind that you can’t make a sandwich — by the end of this year, you will be on Masterchef. This is going to be your year.! Don’t let anyone tell you the opposite — you need to put all those burnt dinners, unrisen cakes and inedible meals behind you. Let go of the ineptitude and social awkwardness that have been dogging you since childhood, and repeat to yourself that this time, THIS TIME, you will completely turn over a new leaf and become someone else entirely.

By this time next year, you will be lighter, fitter, more linguistic, a better baker, accomplished cook, and will have learned a whole host of new skills. You’ll have possibly re-trained as a ninja. You will be in a meaningful and fulfilling relationship with someone who desires you as much as you desire family-sized tubs of Ben & Jerrys, and you will have quit your mind-numbing soul-destroying job for something that not only pays three times more, but is glamorous and thrilling. Believe it.