It's the time for all those "New Year, New You" features in magazines and newspapers, which is handy because everyone I know is in agreement on one thing, and that is I look like a tramp at the moment.

The suit I wear for work has, putting it kindly, seen better days. I bought it for a friend's wedding a couple of years ago. The suit has outlasted the marriage, but only just. The jacket wants to go to counselling with a view to staying together but the trousers have just given up the ghost and want to just get ripped up for dusters and call it a day.

I am also having problems around the hair region. Not only is my hair now so long and thick that I have adopted the appearance of a 1970s used car salesman who sometimes does a bit of dodgy business with some tasty geezers in Soho clubs, but it is now more grey than dark.

The children think I should dye it, but I am of the opinion that would merely cement my 70s dodgy geezer look and everyone would point and laugh at me. Fortunately, Mrs B also does not want me to dye it. She would settle for me getting it cut.

Also, the sole is coming off my shoes. Fortunately, I managed to find some superglue and stick it back on the other morning. Less fortunately, when I came to take my shoe off my sock was stuck fast to the inside of it, and I ripped a big hole in my sock.

Needless to say, this isn't good. Pairs of matching socks are as rare as sexually active pandas round our place.

It is, by everyone's estimation, time for an image makeover, and I have promised everyone that come pay-day I will invest in a new suit, get a haircut and might even buy a pair of new shoes.

It is time to start caring again about my personal appearance. The weird thing is, I would never have been seen dead in a tatty old suit and holey shoes at one time.

But you hit a certain point when there always seems to be more important things to spend money on, and time seems better spent doing other things than waiting in line at the barber's or trying on suits for work.

And that's the point where you have to drag yourself back from the brink of this particular abyss and say to yourself, no, I will not continue to walk around like an extra from Worzel Gummidge. I will not shamble down the street like a hobo out of a Glen Campbell song. I will not embarrass my children by looking like Stig of the Dump's uncle.

So I will get a new suit and some new shoes and I will even get my haircut. But I will not dye my hair, because that way madness lies. There are just some things that are too late to tackle, and going grey is one of them.