AS the old year staggers towards the finishing line and the new one hovers over the starting blocks, one doesn't know whether to glance backward or lean forward.

Tomorrow 2014 will be history and our memory of it will fade faster than a water-colour in sunlight. Meanwhile, who but a fairground astrologer knows what 2015 holds.

Living your life from one headline to the next gives you a warped perspective. To make a newspaper, something must happen and when not much does the days can seem long and empty. In newsrooms I have often heard colleagues plead for there to be a break in the calm.

At this time of year, though, an unusual quiet descends. Many people are on holiday and seem reluctant to leave their houses. There is a sense that the world is taking a breather, content to look inward not outward. As such, we are concerned with small things of the kind that no one would dream of placing before the reading or watching public.

I say "no one" but I don't really mean that. Many of my favourite writers are those who do not concern themselves with what we might call "events". Rather, they rejoice in the quotidian, the everyday, the apparently unremarkable.

One of poets to whom I am often drawn is Hugo Williams, who lives alone in North London and who, for the past few years, has trudged thrice weekly to hospital for dialysis. Williams has a poem called You Have to Laugh. "Well done for getting up!" it opens, "Well done for getting dressed!"

When I first read it I laughed, for it expressed how I feel some mornings when it's still dark outside and you can feel in your bones that until the central heating kicks in the house is so cold it makes the average igloo seem like a sauna.

But funny though the poem is it is also poignant, describing the slow, deliberate movements of someone winding down. The beauty, the art, is in the manner of its expression. The man in the poem comes to a standstill in the hall, having had what might be termed a "turn", and he thinks: "You have to smile/ when the mist clears/ and you don't know where you are./ Perhaps a Lemsip would make you feel better?"

Another envied writer is the American novelist Nicholson Baker. Like John Updike and Alice Munro, Baker is a celebrant of small towns and so-called ordinary people. In his novella A Box of Matches, nothing of any note occurs. The narrator gets up earlier and earlier each day and moves about the house while his wife and children sleep on. He lights the fire, prepares breakfast, feeds pets, thinks about this and that, the sort of things we all do. "Making coffee in the dark," he muses, "especially when the moon has set, or when there is no moon, is a skill that improves with practice."

This is life as it is for most of us. Like Baker's protagonist, I prefer mornings, even in winter, when a waxy moon is still visible and the grass on the links is covered in a coating of floury ice. As yet, no cars pass under the window and only dog owners are about, dragged from their beds to exercise their mutts. The glass of orange juice goes down like a double vodka followed by mug after mug of tea, panacea for all ills, and I tune in to the litany of disaster on the Today programme or put on a blast of rock music.

These mornings I've been thinking a lot about a friend, the poet Alastair Reid, who died, aged 88, last September. While some live to write, Alastair wrote to live. He had the uncommon talent of making himself at home wherever he over-nighted. The kitchen was his preferred room and he moved around it like a cat on patrol. Once, he paid me the ultimate compliment, saying that our kitchen was best ordered he'd ever found, by which he meant he could put his hands on everything he needed. He was a great soup maker, as I have come to be, and on one of his last visits left a liquidiser with which to pulp and puree vegetables. Whenever I use it, Alastair is there by my side, ready to add salt as required.