REJOICE all ye who did Dry January or Veganuary. One more day to thole.
You can come down from the moral high ground now and stop feeling superior to the rest of us whose cast-iron resolve turned out to be merely cardboard and didn't last a wet week.
Self-denial is altogether admirable, but not when accessorised with smugness.
Snowdrops, those welcome harbingers of spring, are poking their wee white heads above ground. In my backyard, weeds are sprouting between the paving stones, there's a generous crop of rushes thriving in the middle of my sodden lawn, just in time for St Brigid's Day, a fine coat of winter glar on the windows and lengthening Saturday queues of civic-minded citizens waiting their turn to hurl perfectly serviceable stuff into council skips or haul it off to charity shops.
It's the time of year when the model housewife surveys her little kingdom and thinks: "Time for a major clear-out."
It's the time of year when the less scrupulous home-maker reads articles in newspapers advocating decluttering and donating - and turns hurriedly to the holiday offers.
We live in a social climate of contradictions. When you think of it, our basic needs are simple and few - a weatherproof shelter, heat, light, water; a chair, a table, a basin, a bed, a cooker, a cupboard.
Yet in our homes we negotiate our way round an obstacle course of surplus furniture, bursting wardrobes, crowded shelves and bulging cupboards.
Our gracious interiors are a riot of decorative and useless objects, our bedrooms a style-statement smother of quilts, cushions and throws.
The clever purveyors of all this stuff are careful to keep us perpetual victims of the ever-changing 'look'.
We rarely jettison anything worn out these days, merely outdated or 'tired of'.
Not in my case. I'm a pathological keeper. You never know when candlewick bedspreads might come back into fashion.
Lately there's been a proliferation of publications persuading us to live with less, introduce simplicity to our busy lives and have about us only the necessary and meaningful.
My friend has 'Marie Kondo'-ed her wardrobe, her underwear drawer and her airing cupboard into visions of symmetry and wonder. Even her socks are folded.
I'm still recovering from the embarrassment of a guest who mistook my hot-press door for the bathroom and disappeared under a tsunami of towels.
Said friend has lent me a book entitled The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. What a cheerful title.
Its premise is that we, who have less time left than we've already lived, ought to make a radical edit of all our possessions NOW while we're able - to save our children the trouble of doing it when we're gone.
Talk about 'Here's your hat and what's your hurry'... Having cleared the decks after my mother, mother-in-law and Auntie Mollie, the least I might expect is someone to do it for me.
Mind you, I don't envy them the task, since most of the aforementioned ladies' effects ended up in my house.
I come of a long line of hoarders. I'm heading for the roofspace now to gauge the scale of the endeavour. I may be some time...
I'm back. It's foundering up there and I can't get more than three feet in for stuff. It's not the THINGS - it's their associations with events and people and places.
My mother's 1930s' satin evening dress that she altered for me for my first grown-up dance, the trio of brass ducks that flew up Auntie Mollie's parlour wall, my childhood dolls' house; Daughter Dear's first babygro and shoes, the Loving Spouse's big sheepskin coat; my father's collection of John McCormack's songs on 78rpm crackle-and-hiss Parlophone discs; and 30 years of my writing for radio and this newspaper, every word by hand; and letters and photographs that catalogue lives and loves and friendships.
I haven't the heart to part with them. Just turning the page in my diary now, I notice the aphorism printed across the top.
"If not now - WHEN?" Well... not today.
