When time hangs heavy in your head, or . . . The morning after the year before

If you don't recognise the symptoms, well done. But this is certainly one: a nervous system that feels like a nudist in a briar patch. All sensation is pain. There are other symptoms.

There's that terrible unfocused gloom that makes you feel as if it's permanently four in the morning - one of those times when you waken in the dark and the problems that seemed like mole hills yesterday have grown overnight into your private Himalayas and there's no way you'll ever get over them and you pray for the light. Only now it's daylight already and there's no relief.

Even your mind feels sore and you suspect you'll never be able to think again. And then, unfortunately, you can. For here comes memory but not in a form you can put straight into your autobiography. This is more like a whodunnit.

There is a mysterious bruise on your hand. It looks like a map of India. The television is leaning backwards against the wall in a posture of submission. Is there a connection between these two strange facts? Have you taken to abusing inanimate objects?

And that remark. No. You didn't say that. Suddenly, you can hear your voice saying it but you couldn't have said that. Yes you did. You can see how the woman's face was as you said it. It looks like that face in Battleship Potemkin when the baby in the pram is bouncing down the Odessa Steps to what seems like certain death. All our illusions are as delicate as babies and you've killed one of hers. You did say it. And to her. She's probably one of the sweetest people you know.

There's no way back from a remark like that. That's one relationship gone. A friendship carefully nurtured over years and flushed down the loo in one mindless sentence. About all you could do now is to send her a dozen roses with your suicide note attached.

Never mind the roses, just write the note. For it wasn't just her. Was there anybody you didn't offend? There were people vaulting over tables and jumping out of windows just to get away from you. What's wrong with you? You're a complete waste of space. You'd be better to make room for the real people.

And so it goes. Half-formed thoughts gather round you like the conspirators in Julius Caesar, whispering among themselves and pointing at you. You realise that you've reached the point where you can't trust your own mind. Was it really as bad as you feel it was? You have to get out of this head.

But that's not the easiest trick. Only three ways are possible. The first is the legendary hair of the dog. It's difficult to believe in this one. Isn't that a bit like smoking another cigarette to clear your lungs?

The second is to take the pharmaceutical route. This kind of angst, they tell us, is just a chemical imbalance in the brain. Ingest a couple of pills and wait for chemical equilibrium to be re-established. But won't mental clarity simply bring your self-contempt into sharper focus?

The third road is the one you have to take, sooner or later. You have to face other people. You have to get a fresh perspective through their eyes. You have to realign your thoughts by taking compass-readings from the thoughts of other people.

Oh, the pain of pleasure. And this is just for a hangover. The hangover is something on a bigger scale altogether. The hangover is the one you can get after Christmas and New Year, when the festive spirit has evaporated like wine-fumes and left you with a sense of the brevity of success and the longevity of failure. Other hangovers are just the morning after the night before. This one is the morning after the year before. This is the big one.

It's so powerful, you can experience it without even having had a drink. Just the gap in the calendar can be enough to leave you disorientated from your habitual behaviour and over-sensitive to your own inadequacies. Those people who claim that this time of year is really no different from any other and that we've just invented its significance are, I think, kidding themselves.

It's appropriate, at least for the northern hemisphere, that Christianity should have fixed the birth of new hope now and that the New Year becomes a formal acknowledgement of an old end and a new beginning. This has always been a dark season for northerners. Time itself seems hung over. Even the weather is brooding. It becomes a natural impulse to count your dead.

We're counting ours in The Jury Room, holding a casual wake for the old year. We're taking the third way I mentioned, relating last year's small catastrophes to one another. Failure shared is failure put in perspective.

Tequila Sunset can't believe the amount of time she wasted on men who seem in retrospect to have had all the sensitivity of a brick. Maybe she's thinking of all those notes she left on bedside tables that might as well have been marked: Not known at this address. Gus the Guru feels that the year has passed without him having noticed it. He wonders if he was at the barber's at the time. He says that at his age a year passes like an express train and he's a station at which it doesn't stop.

Karma Chameleon is worried about what the year may have done to her three children. As a single parent with no other adult in the house to bounce her problems off, she is constantly unsure of where understanding ends and unhealthy indulgence begins. She is afraid she may have become too lenient. If childhood is where adulthood is shaped, is she in the process of making three amorphous egos?

O U Wilson is perhaps the most concerned of all of us. Christmas, it seems, was a fair old disaster for him. His family would appear to have suffered from what can be one of the unfortunate side-effects of the festive season: with every other window lit up like a Christmas card and most families busy acting out domestic bliss, you can feel like the only misfits in town. He and Samantha Very Sapiens quarrelled constantly. The behaviour of his son and daughter was appalling. Happy New Year?

Mary Contrary can sense an upbeat note in all of this, as she often can. At least the heightened sense of time remorselessly passing, which you get at this time of year, makes you look at your life honestly. You're forced to see past the advertisers' images of who you should be and contemplate who you really are. You're very strongly aware of your life as something utterly individual to you. You can decide more clearly what you want to do with it. You can renew your resolution.

This doesn't seem to cheer Greyman up too much. Resolution? He can't think of a resolution he ever kept in his life. We know what he means. Since most of us can't even remember the resolutions we made last New Year, it would seem to follow that we haven't kept them.

Dave the Rave has an idea. Why not make deliberately bad resolutions? Since it's a natural human impulse to break them, we would then turn out to be doing good. Mary takes the point. She decides to release me from my promise to stop smoking for a week and demands that I start smoking at least 80 a day. Then maybe my failure to reach my target will make me give up smoking altogether in disgust.

But in this post-Christmas time of being surrounded, many of us, by all the things we don't need, maybe the resolutions we make should be not merely personal and certainly not material. They should perhaps relate to how we want other people to be able to live as well as ourselves.

This week, I tell the others, I attended the funeral of a friend in Kilmarnock. Ron Brailsford was a man built like a bull and reduced to a wraith by cancer but his spirit still had horns. He lived determinedly on his own terms to the end. To the very brink of death he insisted on fulfilling his duties as an SNP councillor and on dispensing his enormous good nature to everyone. He was one ferocious carer. When I saw his coffin draped in the Saltire, I remembered his passion for a Scottish Parliament. He died in the anteroom to our Parliament. But may his kind of spirit inform the place when it comes.

In this hangover season of the year, I won't just be ingesting chemicals to renew myself. I'll be absorbing the memory of people like Big Ron.

We have things to do beyond our private lives. Let's do them well.

Look out, millennium.