Can there really be another two weeks of January left to go? I'm not sure why it should be so, but the month does tend to drag on and on and on.

Perhaps it's some kind of karmic payback for Christmas - you enjoyed yourself at the end of December, therefore the dank, dark, cash-less 31 days of January will seem twice as long.

And I say that as someone who has a birthday in January as well. It's great to have a birthday two weeks after Christmas; absolutely no-one, but noone, has any money or any inclination to celebrate. My missus, who must be the biggest January-hater I've ever met, does a sterling job of trying to make it a nice day, gawd bless her, but over the years I've had to put up with friends not wanting to go out because it's Janu-ary and they're skint. And I totally sympathise; in a more civilised world, we'd all be able to hibernate in front of Celebrity Big Brother and Desperate Housewives until the clocks go forward, or failing that Feb-ruary 1 at the earliest.

It's been well documented recently that some boffin scientifically worked out that January 23 is totally the worst-ever day of the year, pretty much for the arguments listed above as to why January is generally a rubbish month. What I find even more depressing is that January 23 is the best part of a week away - things are going to get even more miserable than they are now before they are going to get any better, in other words.

I've decided that the way to make it through January is to do some or all of the jobs that I have been prom-ising to do for the past few weeks/months/years (delete as applicable).

Obviously, some of these are unfeasible to do on my own and without a fairly hefty injection of cash from somewhere - transforming the garage into a playroom, buying a new car and laying a patio, to name but three.

No, the way forward is to do plenty of small but ultimately rewarding jobs. The first thing on my mental tick-list is to remove the Halloween pumpkins that have been on the decking for, well, for about three months now.

Halloween pumpkins are the new Christmas trees in the Barnett household. Usually we get a real Christmas tree and after the festive period it's dumped in the garden until about August, when I think about dragging its brittle framework into the car and taking it to the dump or the recycling centre, which leaves a lovely carpet of dried pine needles in the motor.

As Mrs B read recently that small children can choke on pine needles, it was decided that we would be without a real tree this year. So in lieu of having a fir tree making a mess in the garden, I've opted to have two carved pumpkins slowly collapsing upon themselves and creating an expanding puddle of mushed-up, insect-infested slop on the decking.

The big problem is how to get rid of them - there's no way I'm touching them. I think the necessary method will be to slide a spade or shovel under at quite high speed and then toss them towards the wheelie bin.

Mrs B hasn't mentioned the frankly disgusting sight of these pumpkins rotting in the garden, but then again she rarely looks out of the window at the depressing vista of January spread out before her, so I reckon I've got another couple of weeks.